Let’s Encrypt Turns Ten ⇥ letsencrypt.org

Josh Aas, of Let’s Encrypt:

On September 14, 2015, our first publicly-trusted certificate went live. We were proud that we had issued a certificate that a significant majority of clients could accept, and had done it using automated software. Of course, in retrospect this was just the first of billions of certificates. Today, Let’s Encrypt is the largest certificate authority in the world in terms of certificates issued, the ACME protocol we helped create and standardize is integrated throughout the server ecosystem, and we’ve become a household name among system administrators. We’re closing in on protecting one billion web sites.

Via Ben Werdmuller:

A decade ago, only organizations with money, patience, and technical support could reliably encrypt their sites. Everyone else — small nonprofits, bloggers, community groups, activists — were effectively told that their work wasn’t important enough to deserve confidentiality. Let’s Encrypt leveled that playing field.

It truly changed the web, ushering in an era where most browsers effectively assume connections will be made over HTTPS and treating plain HTTP as an anomaly. The push for security has its critics, most notably Dave Winer who promises HTTP forever. On the whole, though, it is difficult not to see Let’s Encrypt as revolutionary. This very website has a certificate issued by them.

An ironic side effect of the popularity of Let’s Encrypt is that its Certificate Transparency Logs are a fruitful resource for bots and bad actors finding new domains to exploit. A 2023 paper by Stijn Pletinckx, et al. (PDF) describes how automated traffic began hitting test servers “just seconds after publishing the [certificate log] entry” compared to no attempts against domains without a certificate. This traffic typically looks like attempts to find unpatched vulnerabilities, like basic SQL injection strings and bugs in common WordPress plugins. This abuse of C.T. logs is not unique to Let’s Encrypt. But it is popular and free, and that makes its logs a target-rich environment. Neither is this a reason to avoid using Let’s Encrypt. It just means one needs to be cautious about what is on their server from the moment they decide to install an HTTPS certificate.

Fault and Responsibility

The surprise departure of Alan Dye announced a week ago today provoked an outpouring of reactions both thoughtful and puerile. The general consensus seemed to be oh, hell yeah, with seemingly few lining up to defend Dye’s overseeing of Apple’s software design efforts. But something has been gnawing at me all week reading take after take, and I think it was captured perfectly by Jason Snell, of Six Colors, last week:

So. In the spirit of not making it personal, I think it’s hard to pile all of Apple’s software design missteps over the last few years at the feet of Alan Dye. He had support from other executives. He led a whole team of designers. Corporate initiatives and priorities can lead even the most well-meaning of people into places they end up regretting.

That said, Alan Dye has represented Apple’s design team in the same way that Jony Ive did ever since Jony took over software design. He was the public face of Liquid Glass. He has been a frequent target of criticism, some of it quite personal, all coming from the perspective that Apple’s design output, especially on the software side, has been seriously lacking for a while now.

This nuanced and careful reaction, published shortly after Dye’s departure was announced, holds up and is the thing I keep coming back to. Snell expanded on these comments on the latest episode of Upgrade with Myke Hurley. I think it is a good discussion and well worth your time. (Thanks to Jack Wellborn for suggesting I listen.)

Cast your mind back to two days earlier, when Apple said John Giannandrea was retiring. Giannandrea, coming from running search and A.I. at Google, signalled to many that Apple was taking the future of Siri seriously. For whatever reason — insufficient support from Apple, conflicting goals, reassignments to questionable projects, or any number of other things — that did not pan out. Siri today works similarly to Siri eight years ago, before he joined the company, the launch of Apple Intelligence was fumbled, and the features rolled out so far do not feel like Apple products. Maybe none of this was the fault of Giannandrea, yet all of it was his responsibility.

It is difficult to know from the outside what impact Giannandrea’s retirement will have for the future of Siri or Apple Intelligence. Similarly, two days after that was announced, Dye said he was leaving, too, and Apple promoted Stephen Lemay to replace him, at least temporarily. From everything I have seen, people within Apple seem to love this promotion. However, it would be wrong to think Lemay is swooping in to save the day, both because that is an immense amount of pressure to put on someone who is probably already feeling it, and because the conditions that resulted in my least favourite design choices surely had agreement from plenty of other people at Apple.

While I am excited for the potential of a change in direction, I do not think this singlehandedly validates the perception of declining competence in Apple’s software design. It was Dye’s responsibility, to be sure, but it was not necessarily his fault. I do not mean that as an excuse, though I wish I did. The taste of those in charge undoubtably shapes what is produced across the company. And, despite a tumultuous week at the top of Apple’s org chart, many of those people remain in charge. To Snell’s point of not personalizing things, and in the absence of a single mention of “design” on its leadership page, the current direction of Apple’s software should be thought of as a team effort. Whether one person should be granted the authority to transform the taste of the company’s leadership into a coherent, delightful, and usable visual language is a good question. Regardless, it will be their responsibility even if it is not their fault.

Generative Clickbait, Brought to You by Google and Meta ⇥ 404media.co

Sean Hollister, the Verge:

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

[…]

But in the seeming attempt to boil down every story to four words or less, Google’s new headline experiment is attaching plenty of misleading and inane headlines to journalists’ work, and with little disclosure that Google’s AI is rewriting them.

Rewriting headlines may be new to Google Discover, but it is not new to Google. In fact, some research indicates page titles and descriptions are automatically rewritten more often than not in search results, and I am of two minds about this practice. It robs publishers and website owners of agency over how they present themselves through an important source of referral traffic. Google’s automatic rewrites are — as I have experienced in search results and as documented by Hollister in Discover — sometimes wrong, and have the effect of putting words in authors’ mouths.

Still, the titles and descriptions supplied by webpages are sometimes inaccurate, too — often deliberately. Sometimes, there are people writing clickbait headlines; it is common practice in search engine optimization circles. For search results, Google tends to generate headlines that are less clickbait-y than might appear in the original publication. However, Hollister shows examples from Discover where Google’s version is entirely misleading. And Google is not the only company doing automatic clickbait nonsense.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Instagram is generating headlines for users’ Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.

[…]

Google told me that it is not generating the headlines, and that it’s pulling the text directly from Instagram. Meta acknowledged my request for comment but did not respond in time for publication. I’ll update this story if I hear back.

Meta’s Andy Stone, once again not on Threads but instead on Bluesky, quoted Joseph Cox’s link to the story writing:

Reports the outlet that definitely does not, ever, write clickbait-y, SEO-optimized headlines

This, obviously, does not meaningfully challenge Maiberg’s reporting, as it is Instagram generating these page titles specifically for Google whether users like it or not. This is just distracting nonsense. I wonder if being a dishonest asshole is a job description for Meta’s communications department.

Icons in Menus ⇥ blog.jim-nielsen.com

Apple, in the 2020 edition of its Human Interface Guidelines:

Sometimes, icons can be used to help people recognize menu items—not menus—and associate them with content. For example, Safari uses the icons displayed by some webpages (known as favicons) to produce a visual connection between the webpage and the menu item for that webpage.

Minimize the use of icons. Use icons in menus only when they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons may appear cluttered and be difficult to read.

Apple, in the latest version of its Human Interface Guidelines:

Represent menu item actions with familiar icons. Icons help people recognize common actions throughout your app. Use the same icons as the system to represent actions such as Copy, Share, and Delete, wherever they appear. […]

Jim Nielsen:

It’s extra noise to me. It’s not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below). It’s more that I don’t like the idea of “give each menu item an icon” being the default approach.

This posture lends itself to a practice where designers have an attitude of “I need an icon to fill up this space” instead of an attitude of “Does the addition of a icon here, and the cognitive load of parsing and understanding it, help or hurt how someone would use this menu system?”

Nielsen explores the different menus in Safari on MacOS Tahoe — I assume version 26.0 or 26.1. I am running 26.2, with a more complete set of icons in each menu, though not to the user’s benefit. For example, in Neilsen’s screenshot, the Safari menu has a gear icon beside the “Settings…” menu item, but not beside the “Settings for pxlnv.com…”, or whatever the current domain is. In 26.2, the latter has gained an icon — another gear. But it is a gear that is different from the “Settings…” menu item just above it, which makes sense, and also from the icon beside the “Website Settings…” menu item accessible from the menu in the address bar, which does not make sense because it does exactly the same thing.

Also, the context menu for a tab has three “×” icons, one after another, for each of the “Close Tab” menu items. This is not clarifying and is something the HIG says is not permitted.

How a User Interface Degrades Over Time ⇥ grumpy.website

Nikita Prokopov:

The original Windows 95 interface is _functional_. It has a function and it executes it very well. It works for you, without trying to be clever or sophisticated. Also, it follows system conventions, which also helps you, the user.

I’m not sure whom the bottom interface [from Windows 11] helps. It’s a puzzle, an art object, but it doesn’t work for you. It’s not here to make your life easier.

As someone who uses a Windows computer for my day job, I can confidently say this allergy to contrast affects both platforms alike, and Prokopov’s comparison offers just one example. Why this trend persists, I have no idea. I find it uncomfortable to look at for long periods of work — the kind of time I imagine is comparable to those who build these operating systems.

Toronto Reduced Pedestrian Deaths With Normal, Boring Strategies ⇥ cbc.ca

Karina Zapata, CBC News:

It’s [14 this year] the highest number of pedestrian deaths on Calgary Police Service records, which date back to 1996. According to police, it’s a death toll only seen once before, in 2005.

[…]

Here in Canada, Toronto has significantly reduced its pedestrian deaths over the past decade.

According to the City of Toronto, it has seen 16 pedestrian deaths so far this year. While that number is slightly higher than Calgary’s, it’s a far cry from the 41 pedestrian deaths in 2018.

For the record, the reduction of pedestrian deaths in Toronto this year is not because a whole bunch of people went out and bought autonomous cars. I am not saying these technologies cannot help. But the ways in which Toronto — with a metro area four times as populous as Calgary’s — cut deaths so drastically are entirely boring like, according to this article, enforcing existing rules and better planning of lane closures. Neither of those things will get a breathless New York Times op-ed, but they are doable in any city tomorrow.

Edmonton Police Preempt Privacy Commissioner in Facial Recognition Bodycam Deployment ⇥ edmontonjournal.com

CBC News:

Edmonton police are testing out artificial intelligence facial-recognition bodycams without approval from Alberta’s information and privacy commissioner Diane McLeod.

Police say they don’t legally require what they describe as “feedback” from the commissioner during the trial or proof of concept stage.

But in an interview Wednesday on CBC’s Edmonton AM, McLeod said they do.

Liam Newbigging, Edmonton Journal:

Police at the Tuesday event to unveil the pilot said the assessment was sent to Alberta’s privacy commissioner Diane McLeod to ensure a “proof of concept test” for body-worn video cameras with new facial recognition technology is fair and respects people’s privacy.

But the office of the information and privacy commissioner told Postmedia in an email that the assessment didn’t reach it until Tuesday afternoon and that it’s possible that the review of the assessment might not be finished until the police pilot project is already over.

This looks shady, and I do not understand the rush. Rick Smith — the CEO of Axon, which markets body cameras and Tasers — points out the company has not supported facial recognition in its cameras since it rejected it on privacy grounds in 2019. Surely, Edmonton Police could have waited a couple of months for the privacy commissioner’s office to examine the plan for compliance.

Smith (emphasis mine):

The reality is that facial recognition is already here. It unlocks our phones, organizes our photos, and scans for threats in airports and stadiums. The question is not whether public safety will encounter the technology—it is how to ensure it delivers better community safety while minimizing mistakes that could undermine trust or overuse that encroaches on privacy unnecessarily. For Axon, utility and responsibility must move in lockstep: solutions must be accurate enough to meaningfully help public safety, and constrained enough to avoid misuse.

Those three examples are not at all similar to each other; only one of them is similar to Axon’s body cameras, and I do not mean that as a compliment.

We opt into using facial recognition to unlock our phones, and the facial recognition technology organizing our photo libraries is limited to saved media. The use of facial recognition in stadiums and airports is the closest thing to Axon’s technology, in that it is used specifically for security screening.

This is a disconcerting step toward a more surveilled public space. It is not like the Edmonton Police are a particularly trusted institution. Between 2009–2016 (PDF), roughly 90% of people in Edmonton strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement “I have a lot of confidence in the EPS [Edmonton Police Service]”. This year, that number has dropped to around 54% (PDF) — though the newer survey also allows for a “neither confident nor unconfident” response, which 22% of people agreed with. Among Indigenous, 2SLGBTQI+, and unhoused populations, the level of distrust in the EPS rises dramatically.

Public trust is not reflective of the reality of crime in Edmonton, which has declined somewhat in the same time period, despite growing by half a million people. However, institutional trust is a requirement for such an invasive practice. A good step toward gaining trust is to ensure it has clearance from the privacy commissioner’s office before beginning a trial.

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The European Commission Should Not Be on X in the First Place ⇥ politico.eu

Bjarke Smith-Meyer, Politico:

The European Commission has lost access to its control panel for buying and tracking ads on Elon Musk’s X — after fining the social media platform €120 million for violating EU transparency rules.

“Your ad account has been terminated,” X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, wrote on the platform early Sunday.

Bier accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying “to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer — to post a link that deceives users into thinking it’s a video and to artificially increase its reach.”

The first thing to know about Bier’s explanation is that it is not true. The E.U. did, in fact, post a video in its tweet. You can verify that for yourself by viewing the tweet on the web, and it is visible on X mirror websites. However, tapping on the video thumbnail from the iOS app does not begin playback; instead, it takes you to the news release. The Commission provided a statement to TechCrunch saying it has not paid for advertising since October 2023 — good! — and that it used the platform’s own tools for this post.

Also, why would this “artificially increase its reach”? I thought “links are not deboosted”, and that it was “[b]est to post a text/image/video summary of what’s at the link for people to view and then decide if they want to click the link”. It is so hard to keep track of the policies of a platform run by liars and frauds.

Which, by the way, is why the European Commission should not be doing anything on X in the first place. Bier has stumbled into doing them a favour. The world’s richest man does not need anyone else’s advertising money for his incendiary website, and the Commission should not be rewarding it with attention. Let it rot.

Update: I updated the title and text of this post after reading the statement made to TechCrunch noting the E.C. has not paid for advertising on X in two years.

Meta Plans Deep Cuts to Metaverse Efforts ⇥ bloomberg.com

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg is expected to meaningfully cut resources for building the so-called metaverse, an effort that he once framed as the future of the company and the reason for changing its name from Facebook Inc.

Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30% for the metaverse group next year, which includes the virtual worlds product Meta Horizon Worlds and its Quest virtual reality unit, according to people familiar with the talks, who asked not to be named while discussing private company plans. Cuts that high would most likely include layoffs as early as January, according to the people, though a final decision has not yet been made.

Wagner’s reporting was independently confirmed by Mike Isaac, of the New York Times, and Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells, of the Wall Street Journal, albeit in slightly different ways. While Wagner wrote it “would most likely include layoffs as early as January”, Isaac apparently confirmed the budget cuts are likely large-scale personnel cuts, which makes sense:

The cuts could come as soon as next month and amount to 10 to 30 percent of employees in the Metaverse unit, which works on virtual reality headsets and a V.R.-based social network, the people said. The numbers of potential layoffs are still in flux, they said. Other parts of the Reality Labs division develop smart glasses, wristbands and other wearable devices. The total number of employees in Reality Labs could not be learned.

Alan Dye is just about to join Reality Labs. I wonder if this news comes as a fun surprise for him.

At Meta Connect a few months ago, the company spent basically the entire time on augmented reality glasses, but it swore up and down it was all related to its metaverse initiatives:

We’re hard at work advancing the state of the art in augmented and virtual reality, too, and where those technologies meet AI — that’s where you’ll find the metaverse.

The metaverse is whatever Meta needs it to be in order to justify its 2021 rebrand.

Our vision for the future is a world where anyone anywhere can imagine a character, a scene, or an entire world and create it from scratch. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress. In fact, we’re not far off from being able to create compelling 3D content as easily as you can ask Meta AI a question today. And that stands to transform not just the imagery and videos we see on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but also the possibilities of VR and AR, too.

You know, whenever I am unwinding and chatting with friends after a long day at work, I always get this sudden urge to create compelling 3D content.

Lisa Jackson and Kate Adams Out at Apple, Jennifer Newstead to Join ⇥ macstories.net

Apple:

Apple today announced that Jennifer Newstead will become Apple’s general counsel on March 1, 2026, following a transition of duties from Kate Adams, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2017. She will join Apple as senior vice president in January, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

In addition, Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, will retire in late January 2026. The Government Affairs organization will transition to Adams, who will oversee the team until her retirement late next year, after which it will be led by Newstead. Newstead’s title will become senior vice president, General Counsel and Government Affairs, reflecting the combining of the two organizations. The Environment and Social Initiatives teams will report to Apple chief operating officer Sabih Khan.

What will tomorrow bring, I wonder?

Newstead has spent the past year working closely with Joel Kaplan, and fighting the FTC’s case against Meta — successfully, I should add. Before that, she was a Trump appointee at the U.S. State Department. Well positioned, then, to fight Apple’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against a second-term Trump government that has successfully solicited Apple’s money.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Although Apple doesn’t say so in its press release, it’s pretty clear that a few things are playing out among its executive ranks. First, a large number of them are approaching retirement age, and Apple is transitioning and changing roles internally to account for those who are retiring. Second, the company is dealing with departures like Alan Dye’s and what appears to be the less-than-voluntary retirement of John Giannandrea. Finally, the company is reducing the number of Tim Cook’s direct reports, which is undoubtedly to simplify the transition to a new CEO in the relatively near future.

A careful reader will notice Apple’s newsroom page currently has press releases for these departures and, from earlier this week, John Giannandrea’s, but there is nothing about Alan Dye’s. In fact, even in the statement quoted by Bloomberg, Dye is not mentioned. In fairness, Adams, Giannandrea, and Jackson all have bios on Apple’s leadership page. Dye’s was removed between 2017 and 2018.

Starting to think Mark Gurman might be wrong about that FT report.

Waymo Data Indicates Dramatic Safety Improvements Over Human Drivers, So It Is Making Its Cars More Human ⇥ wsj.com

Jonathan Slotkin, a surgeon and venture capital investor, wrote for the New York Times about data released by Waymo indicating impressive safety improvements over human drivers through June 2025:

If Waymo’s results are indicative of the broader future of autonomous vehicles, we may be on the path to eliminating traffic deaths as a leading cause of mortality in the United States. While many see this as a tech story, I view it as a public health breakthrough.

[…]

There’s a public health imperative to quickly expand the adoption of autonomous vehicles. […]

We should be skeptical of all self-reported stats, but these figures look downright impressive.

Slotkin responsibly notes several caveats, though neglects to mention the specific cities in which Waymo operates: Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. These are warm cities with relatively low annual precipitation, almost none of which is ever snow. Slotkin’s enthusiasm for widespread adoption should be tempered somewhat by this narrow range of climate data. Still, its data is compelling. These cars seem to crash less often than those driven by people in the same cities and, in particular, avoid causing serious injuries at an impressive rate.

It is therefore baffling to me that Waymo appears to be treating this as a cushion for experimentation.

Katherine Bindley, in a Wall Street Journal article published the very same day as Slotkin’s Times piece:

The training wheels are off. Like the rule-following nice guy who’s tired of being taken advantage of, Waymos are putting their own needs first. They’re bending traffic laws, getting impatient with pedestrians and embracing the idea that when it comes to city driving, politeness doesn’t pay: It’s every car for itself.

[…]

Waymo has been trying to make its cars “confidently assertive,” says Chris Ludwick, a senior director of product management with Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet. “That was really necessary for us to actually scale this up in San Francisco, especially because of how busy it gets.”

A couple years ago, Tesla’s erroneously named “Full Self-Driving” feature began cruising through crosswalks if it judged it could pass a crossing pedestrian in time, and I wrote:

Advocates of autonomous vehicles often say increased safety is one of its biggest advantages over human drivers. Compliance with the law may not be the most accurate proxy for what constitutes safe driving, but not to a disqualifying extent. Right now, it is the best framework we have, and autonomous vehicles should follow the law. That should not be a controversial statement.

I stand by that. A likely reason for Waymo’s impressive data is that its cars behave with caution and deference. Substituting that with “confidently assertive” driving is a move in entirely the wrong direction. It should not roll through stop signs, even if its systems understand nobody is around. It should not mess up the order of an all-way stop intersection. I have problems with the way traffic laws are written, but it is not up to one company in California to develop a proprietary interpretation. Just follow the law.

Slotkin:

This is not a call to replace every vehicle tomorrow. For one thing, self-driving technology is still expensive. Each car’s equipment costs $100,000 beyond the base price, and Waymo doesn’t yet sell cars for personal use. Even once that changes, many Americans love driving; some will resist any change that seems to alter that freedom.

[…]

There is likely to be some initial public trepidation. We do not need everyone to use self-driving cars to realize profound safety gains, however. If 30 percent of cars were fully automated, it might prevent 40 percent of crashes, as autonomous vehicles both avoid causing crashes and respond better when human drivers err. Insurance markets will accelerate this transition, as premiums start to favor autonomous vehicles.

Slotkin is entirely correct in writing that “Americans love driving” — the U.S. National Household Travel Survey, last conducted in 2022, found 90.5% of commuters said they primarily used a car of some kind (table 7-2, page 50). 4.1% said they used public transit, 2.9% said they walked, and just 2.5% said they chose another mode of transportation in which taxicabs are grouped along with bikes and motorcycles. Those figures are about the same in 2017, though with an unfortunate decline in the number of transit commuters. Commuting is not the only reason for travelling, of course, but this suggests to me that even if every taxicab ride was in an autonomous Waymo, there would still be a massive gap to achieve that 30% adoption rate Slotkin wants. And, if insurance companies begin incentivizing autonomous vehicles, it really means rich people will reap the reward of being able to buy a new car.

Any argument about road safety has to be more comprehensive than what Slotkin is presenting in this article. Regardless of how impressive Waymo’s stats are, it is a vision of the future that is an individualized solution to a systemic problem. I have no specialized knowledge in this area, but I am fascinated by it. I read about this stuff obsessively. The things I want to see are things everyone can benefit from: improvements to street design that encourage drivers to travel at lower speeds, wider sidewalks making walking more comfortable, and generous wheeling infrastructure for bicycles, wheelchairs, and scooters. We can encourage the adoption of technological solutions, too; if this data holds up, it would seem welcome. But we can do so much better for everyone, and on a more predictable timeline.

This is, as Slotkin writes, a public health matter. Where I live, record numbers of people are dying, in part because more people than ever are driving bigger and heavier vehicles with taller fronts while they are distracted. Many of those vehicles will still be on the road in twenty years’ time, even if we accelerate the adoption pace of more autonomous vehicles. We do not need to wait for a headline-friendly technological upgrade. There are boring things cities can start doing tomorrow that would save lives.

Alan Dye Out at Apple ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. has poached Apple Inc.’s most prominent design executive in a major coup that underscores a push by the social networking giant into AI-equipped consumer devices.

The company is hiring Alan Dye, who has served as the head of Apple’s user interface design team since 2015, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Apple is replacing Dye with longtime designer Stephen Lemay, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel changes haven’t been announced.

Big week for changes in Apple leadership.

I am sure more will trickle out about this, but one thing notable to me is that Lemay has been a software designer for over 25 years at Apple. Dye, on the other hand, came from marketing and print design. I do not want to put too much weight on that — someone can be a sufficiently talented multidisciplinary designer — but I am curious to see what Lemay might do in a more senior role.

Admittedly I also have some (perhaps morbid) curiosity about what Dye will do at Meta.

One more note from Gurman’s report:

Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said. Dye will join Meta as chief design officer on Dec. 31.

Let me get this straight: Dye personally launches an overhaul of Apple’s entire visual interface language, then leaves. Is that a good sign for its reception, either internally or externally?

Microsoft Lowers A.I. Software Growth Targets ⇥ arstechnica.com

Benj Edwards, Ars Technica:

Microsoft has lowered sales growth targets for its AI agent products after many salespeople missed their quotas in the fiscal year ending in June, according to a report Wednesday from The Information. The adjustment is reportedly unusual for Microsoft, and it comes after the company missed a number of ambitious sales goals for its AI offerings.

Based on Edwards’ summary — I still have no interest in paying for the Information — it sounds like this mostly affects sales of A.I. “agents”, a riskier technology proposition for businesses. This sounds to me like more concrete evidence of a plateau in corporate interest than the surveys reported on by the Economist.

‘Mad Men’ on HBO Max, in 4K, Somehow Lacking VFX ⇥ vulture.com

Todd Vaziri:

As far as I can tell, Paul Haine was the first to notice something weird going on with HBO Max’ presentation. In one of season one’s most memorable moments, Roger Sterling barfs in front of clients after climbing many flights of stairs. As a surprise to Paul, you can clearly see the pretend puke hose (that is ultimately strapped to the back side of John Slattery’s face) in the background, along with two techs who are modulating the flow. Yeah, you’re not supposed to see that.

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to customers.

Eric Vilas-Boas, Vulture:

How did this happen? Apparently, this wasn’t actually HBO Max’s fault — the streamer received incorrect files from Lionsgate Television, a source familiar with the exchange tells Vulture. Lionsgate is now in the process of getting HBO Max the correct files, and the episodes will be updated as soon as possible.

It just feels clumsy and silly for Lionsgate to supply the wrong files in the first place, and for nobody at HBO to verify they are the correct work. An amateur mistake, frankly, for an ostensibly premium service costing U.S. $11–$23 per month. If I were king for a day, it would be illegal to sell or stream a remastered version of something — a show, an album, whatever — without the original being available alongside it.

John Giannandrea Out at Apple ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

Apple today announced John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down from his position and will serve as an advisor to the company before retiring in the spring of 2026. Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.

When Apple hired Giannandrea from Google in 2018, the New York Times called it a “major coup”, given that Siri was “less effective than its counterparts at Google and Amazon”. The world changed a lot in the past six-and-a-half years, though: Siri is now also worse than a bunch of A.I. products. Of course, Giannandrea’s role at Apple was not limited to Siri. He spent time on the Project Titan autonomous car, which was cancelled early last year, before moving to generative A.I. projects. The first results of that effort were shown at WWDC last year; the most impressive features have yet to ship.

I feel embarrassed and dumb for hoping Giannandrea would help shake the company out of its bizarre Siri stupor. Alas, he is now on the Graceful Executive Exit Express, where he gets to spend a few more months at Apple in a kind of transitional capacity — you know the drill. Maybe Subramanya will help move the needle. Maybe this ex-Googler will make it so. Maybe I, Charlie Brown, will get to kick that football.

A Questionable A.I. Plateau

The Economist:

On November 20th American statisticians released the results of a survey. Buried in the data is a trend with implications for trillions of dollars of spending. Researchers at the Census Bureau ask firms if they have used artificial intelligence “in producing goods and services” in the past two weeks. Recently, we estimate, the employment-weighted share of Americans using AI at work has fallen by a percentage point, and now sits at 11% (see chart 1). Adoption has fallen sharply at the largest businesses, those employing over 250 people. Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology looks surprisingly flimsy.

[…]

Even unofficial surveys point to stagnating corporate adoption. Jon Hartley of Stanford University and colleagues found that in September 37% of Americans used generative AI at work, down from 46% in June. A tracker by Alex Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and colleagues revealed that, in August 2024, 12.1% of working-age adults used generative AI every day at work. A year later 12.6% did. Ramp, a fintech firm, finds that in early 2025 AI use soared at American firms to 40%, before levelling off. The growth in adoption really does seem to be slowing.

I am skeptical of the metrics used by the Economist to produce this summary, in part because they are all over the place, and also because they are mostly surveys. I am not sure people always know they are using a generative A.I. product, especially when those features are increasingly just part of the modern office software stack.

While the Economist has an unfortunate allergy to linking to its sources, I wanted to track them down because a fuller context is sometimes more revealing. I believe the U.S. Census data is the Business Trends and Outlook Survey though I am not certain because its charts are just plain, non-interactive images. In any case, it is the Economist’s own estimate of falling — not stalling — adoption by workers, not an estimate produced by the Census Bureau, which is curious given two of its other sources indicate more of a plateau instead of a decline.

The Hartley, et al. survey is available here and contains some fascinating results other than the specific figures highlighted by the Economist — in particular, that the construction industry has the fourth-highest adoption of generative A.I., that Gemini is shown in Figure 9 as more popular than ChatGPT even though the text on page 7 indicates the opposite, and that the word “Microsoft” does not appear once in the entire document. I have some admittedly uninformed and amateur questions about its validity. At any rate, this is the only source the Economist cites which indicates a decline.

The data point attributed to the tracker operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is curious. The Economist notes “in August 2024, 12.1% of working-age adults used generative A.I. every day at work. A year later 12.6% did”, but I am looking at the dashboard right now, and it says the share using generative A.I. daily at work is 13.8%, not 12.6%. In the same time period, the share of people using it “at least once last week” jumped from 36.1% to 46.9%. I have no idea where that 12.6% number came from.

Finally, Ramp’s data is easy enough to find. Again, I have to wonder about the Economist’s selective presentation. If you switch the chart from an overall view to a sector-based view, you can see adoption of paid subscriptions has more than doubled in many industries compared to October last year. This is true even in “accommodation and food services”, where I have to imagine use cases are few and far between.

After finding the actual source of the Economist’s data, it has left me skeptical of the premise of this article. However, plateauing interest — at least for now — makes sense to me on a gut level. There is a ceiling to work one can entrust to interns or entry-level employees, and that is approximately similar for many of today’s A.I. tools. There are also sector-level limits. Consider Ramp’s data showing high adoption in the tech and finance industries, with considerably less in sectors like healthcare and food services. (Curiously, Ramp says only 29% of the U.S. construction industry has a subscription to generative A.I. products, while Hartley, et al. says over 40% of the construction industry is using it.)

I commend any attempt to figure out how useful generative A.I. is in the real world. One of the problems with this industry right now is that its biggest purveyors are not public companies and, therefore, have fewer disclosure requirements. Like any company, they are incentivized to inflate their importance, but we have little understanding of how much they are exaggerating. If you want to hear some corporate gibberish, OpenAI interviewed executives at companies like Philips and Scania about their use of ChatGPT, but I do not know what I gleaned from either interview — something about experimentation and vague stuff about people being excited to use it, I suppose. It is not very compelling to me. I am not in the C-suite, though.

The biggest public A.I. firm is arguably Microsoft. It has rolled out Copilot to Windows and Office users around the world. Again, however, its press releases leave much to be desired. Levi Strauss employees, Microsoft says, “report the devices and operating system have led to significant improvements in speed, reliability and data handling, with features like the Copilot key helping reduce the time employees spend searching and free up more time for creating”. Sure. In another case study, Microsoft and Pantone brag about the integration of a colour palette generator that you can use with words instead of your eyes.

Microsoft has every incentive to pretend Copilot is a revolutionary technology. For people actually doing the work, however, its ever-nagging presence might be one of many nuisances getting in the way of the job that person actually knows how to do. A few months ago, the company replaced the familiar Office portal with a Copilot prompt box. It is still little more than a thing I need to bypass to get to my work.

All the stats and apparent enthusiasm about A.I. in the workplace are, as far as I can tell, a giant mess. A problem with this technology is that the ways in which it is revolutionary are often not very useful, its practical application in a work context is a mixed bag that depends on industry and role, and its hype encourages otherwise respectable organizations to suggest their proximity to its promised future.

The Economist being what it is, much of this article revolves around the insufficiently realized efficiency and productivity gains, and that is certainly something for business-minded people to think about. But there are more fundamental issues with generative A.I. to struggle with. It is a technology built on a shaky foundation. It shrinks the already-scant field of entry-level jobs. Its results are unpredictable and can validate harm. The list goes on, yet it is being loudly inserted into our SaaS-dominated world as a top-down mandate.

It turns out A.I. is not magic dust you can sprinkle on a workforce to double their productivity. CEOs might be thrilled by having all their email summarized, but the rest of us do not need that. We need things like better balance of work and real life, good benefits, and adequate compensation. Those are things a team leader cannot buy with a $25-per-month-per-seat ChatGPT business license.

An App Named Alan ⇥ tyler.io

Tyler Hall:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.

A good, cheeky name. The results are not what I would call beautiful, but that is not the point, is it? It works well. I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system.

Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

Threads Continues to Reward Rage Bait ⇥ youtube.com

Hank Green was not getting a lot of traction on a promotional post on Threads about a sale on his store. He got just over thirty likes, which does not sound awful, until you learn that was over the span of seven hours and across Green’s following of 806,000 accounts on Threads.

So he tried replying to rage bait with basically the same post, and that was far more successful. But, also, it has some pretty crappy implications:

That’s the signal that Threads is taking from this: Threads is like oh, there’s a discussion going on.

It’s 2025! Meta knows that “lots of discussion” is not a surrogate for “good things happening”!

I assume the home feed ranking systems are similar for Threads and Instagram — though they might not be — and I cannot tell you how many times my feed is packed with posts from many days to a week prior. So many businesses I frequent use it as a promotional tool for time-bound things I learn about only afterward. The same thing is true of Stories, since they are sorted based on how frequently you interact with an account.

Everyone is allowed one conspiracy theory, right? Mine is that a primary reason Meta is hostile to reverse-chronological feeds is because it requires businesses to buy advertising. I have no proof to support this, but it seems entirely plausible.

Moraine Luck

You have seen Moraine Lake. Maybe it was on a postcard or in a travel brochure, or it was on Reddit, or in Windows Vista, or as part of a “Best of California” demo on Apple’s website. Perhaps you were doing laundry in Lucerne. But I am sure you have seen it somewhere.

Moraine Lake is not in California — or Switzerland, for that matter. It is right here in Alberta, between Banff and Lake Louise, and I have been lucky enough to visit many times. One time I was particularly lucky, in a way I only knew in hindsight. I am not sure the confluence of events occurring in October 2019 is likely to be repeated for me.

In 2019, the road up to the lake would be open to the public from May until about mid-October, though the closing day would depend on when it was safe to travel. This is one reason why so many pictures of it have only the faintest hint of snow capping the mountains behind — it is only really accessible in summer.

I am not sure why we decided to head up to Lake Louise and Moraine Lake that Saturday. Perhaps it was just an excuse to get out of the house. It was just a few days before the road was shut for the season.

We visited Lake Louise first and it was, you know, just fine. Then we headed to Moraine.

I posted a higher-quality version of this on my Glass profile.
A photo of Moraine Lake, Alberta, frozen with chunks of ice and rocks on its surface.

Walking from the car to the lakeshore, we could see its surface was that familiar blue-turquoise, but it was entirely frozen. I took a few images from the shore. Then we realized we could just walk on it, as did the handful of other people who were there. This is one of several photos I took from the surface of the lake, the glassy ice reflecting that famous mountain range in the background.

I am not sure I would be able to capture a similar image today. Banff and Lake Louise have received more visitors than ever in recent years, to the extent private vehicles are no longer allowed to travel up to Moraine Lake. A shuttle bus is now required. The lake also does not reliably freeze at an accessible time and, when it does, it can be covered in snow or the water line may have receded. I am not arguing this is an impossible image to create going forward. I just do not think I am likely to see it this way again.

I am very glad I remembered to bring my camera.

OpenAI’s House Counsel to Be Deposed Over Deleted Pirated Material ⇥ hollywoodreporter.com

Winston Cho, the Hollywood Reporter:

To rewind, authors and publishers have gained access to Slack messages between OpenAI’s employees discussing the erasure of the datasets, named “books 1 and books 2.” But the court held off on whether plaintiffs should get other communications that the company argued were protected by attorney-client privilege.

In a controversial decision that was appealed by OpenAI on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ona Wang found that OpenAI must hand over documents revealing the company’s motivations for deleting the datasets. OpenAI’s in-house legal team will be deposed.

Wang’s decision (PDF), to the extent I can read it as a layperson, examines OpenAI’s shifting story about why it erased the books 1 and books2 data sets — apparently, the only time possible training materials were deleted.

I am not sure it has yet been proven OpenAI trained its models on pirated books. Anthropic settled a similar suit in September, and Meta and Apple are facing similar accusations. For practical purposes, however, it is trivial to suggest it did use pirated data in general: if you have access to its Sora app, enter any prompt followed by the word “camrip”.

What is a camrip?, a strictly law-abiding person might ask. It is a label added to a movie pirated in the old-fashioned way: by pointing a video camera at the screen in a theatre. As a result, these videos have a distinctive look and sound which is reproduced perfectly by Sora. It is very difficult for me to see a way in which OpenAI could have trained this model to understand what a camrip is without feeding it a bunch of them, and I do not know of a legitimate source for such videos.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer ⇥ wordpress.org

The Internet Archive released a WordPress plugin not too long ago:

Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer is a WordPress plugin designed to combat link rot—the gradual decay of web links as pages are moved, changed, or taken down. It automatically scans your post content — on save and across existing posts — to detect outbound links. For each one, it checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available.

Via Michael Tsai:

The part where it replaces broken links with archive links is implemented in JavaScript. I like that it doesn’t modify the post content in your database. It seems safe to install the plug-in without worrying about it messing anything up. However, I had kind of hoped that it would fix the links as part of the PHP rendering process. Doing it in JavaScript means that the fixed links are not available in the actual HTML tags on the page. And the data that the JavaScript uses is stored in an invisible <div> under the attribute data-iawmlf-post-links, which makes the page fail validation.

I love the idea of this plugin, but I do not love this implementation. I think I understand why it works this way: for the nondestructive property mentioned by Tsai, and also to account for its dependence on a third-party service of varying reliability. I would love to see a demo of this plugin in action.

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s A.I. Era ⇥ thelocal.to

Nicholas Hune-Brown, the Local:

Every media era gets the fabulists it deserves. If Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and the other late 20th century fakers were looking for the prestige and power that came with journalism in that moment, then this generation’s internet scammers are scavenging in the wreckage of a degraded media environment. They’re taking advantage of an ecosystem uniquely susceptible to fraud—where publications with prestigious names publish rickety journalism under their brands, where fact-checkers have been axed and editors are overworked, where technology has made falsifying pitches and entire articles trivially easy, and where decades of devaluing journalism as simply more “content” have blurred the lines so much it can be difficult to remember where they were to begin with.

This is likely not the first story you have read about a freelancer managing to land bylines in prestigious publications thanks to dependency on A.I. tools, but it is one told very well.

Web Development Tip: Disable Pointer Events on Link Images ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Good tip from Jeff Johnson:

My business website has a number of “Download on the App Store” links for my App Store apps. Here’s an example of what that looks like:

[…]

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

I love the Live Text feature, but it often conflicts with graphics like these. There is a good, simple, two-line CSS trick for web developers that should cover most situations. Also, if you rock a user stylesheet — and I think you should — it seems to work fine as a universal solution. Any issues I have found have been minor and not worth noting. I say give it a shot.

Update: Adding Johnson’s CSS to a user stylesheet mucks up the layout of Techmeme a little bit. You can exclude it by adding div:not(.ii) > before a:has(> img) { display: inline-block; }.

‘The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent’ ⇥ macstories.net

Quinn Nelson:

[…] at a moment when the Mac has roared back to the centre of Apple’s universe, the iPad feels closer than ever to fulfilling its original promise. Except it doesn’t, not really, because while the iPad has gained windowing and external display support, pro apps, all the trappings of a “real computer”, underneath it all, iPadOS is still a fundamentally mobile operating system with mobile constraints baked into its very DNA.

Meanwhile, the Mac is rumoured to be getting everything the iPad does best: touchscreens, OLED displays, thinner designs.

There are things I quibble with in Nelson’s video, including the above-quoted comparison to mere rumours about the Mac. The rest of the video is more compelling as it presents comparisons with the same or similar software on each platform in real-world head-to-head matches.

Via Federico Viticci, MacStories:

I’m so happy that Apple seems to be taking iPadOS more seriously than ever this year. But now I can’t help but wonder if the iPad’s problems run deeper than windowing when it comes to getting serious work done on it.

Apple’s post-iPhone platforms are only as good as Apple will allow them to be. I am not saying it needs to be possible to swap out Bluetooth drivers or monkey around with low-level code, but without more flexibility, platforms like the iPad and Vision Pro are destined to progress only at the rate Apple says is acceptable, and with the third-party apps it says are permissible. These are apparently the operating systems for the future of computers. They are not required to have similar limitations to the iPhone, but they do anyway. Those restrictions are holding back the potential of these platforms.

Polarization in the United States Has Become the World’s Side Hustle ⇥ 404media.co

Marina Dunbar, the Guardian:

Many of the most influential personalities in the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement on X are based outside of the US, including Russia, Nigeria and India, a new transparency feature on the social media site has revealed.

The new tool, called “about this account”, became available on Friday to users of the Elon Musk-owned platform. It allows anyone to see where an account is located, when it joined the platform, how often its username has been changed, and how the X app was downloaded.

This is a similar approach to adding labels or notes to tweets containing misinformation in that it is adding more speech and context. It is more automatic, but the function and intent is comparable, which means Musk’s hobbyist P.R. team must be all worked up. But I checked, and none seem particularly bothered. Maybe they actually care about trust and safety now, or maybe they are lying hacks.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have insisted that anyone working on these [trust and safety] problems was part of a “censorship industrial complex” designed to silence political speech. Politicians like Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan repeated these lies. They treated trust & safety work as a threat to democracy itself.

Then Musk rolled out one basic feature, and within hours proved exactly why trust & safety work existed in the first place.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media, has been covering the monetization of social media:

This has created an ecosystem of side hustlers trying to gain access to these programs and YouTube and Instagram creators teaching people how to gain access to them. It is possible to find these guide videos easily if you search for things like “monetized X account” on YouTube. Translating that phrase and searching in other languages (such as Hindi, Portuguese, Vietnamese, etc) will bring up guides in those languages. Within seconds, I was able to find a handful of YouTubers explaining in Hindi how to create monetized X accounts; other videos on the creators’ pages explain how to fill these accounts with AI-generated content. These guides also exist in English, and it is increasingly popular to sell guides to make “AI influencers,” and AI newsletters, Reels accounts, and TikTok accounts regardless of the country that you’re from.

[…]

Americans are being targeted because advertisers pay higher ad rates to reach American internet users, who are among the wealthiest in the world. In turn, social media companies pay more money if the people engaging with the content are American. This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more.

The U.S. market is a larger audience, too. But those of us in rich countries outside the U.S. should not get too comfortable; I found plenty of guides similar to the ones shown by Koebler for targeting Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and more. Worrisome — especially if you, say, are somewhere with an electorate trying to drive the place you live off a cliff.

Update: Several X accounts purporting to be Albertans supporting separatism appear to be from outside Canada, including a “Concerned 🍁 Mum”, “Samantha”, “Canada the Illusion”, and this “Albertan” all from the United States, and a smaller account from Laos. I tried to check more, but X’s fragile servers are aggressively rate-limited.

I do not think people from outside a country are forbidden from offering an opinion on what is happening within it. I would be a pretty staggering hypocrite if I thought that. Nor do I think we should automatically assume people who are stoking hostile politics on social media are necessarily external or bots. It is more like a reflection of who we are now, and how easily that can be exploited.

Meta’s Accounting of Its Louisiana Data Centre ‘Strains Credibility’ ⇥ wsj.com

Jonathan Weil, Wall Street Journal:

It seems like a marvel of financial engineering: Meta Platforms is building a $27 billion data center in Louisiana, financed with debt, and neither the data center nor the debt will be on its own balance sheet.

That outcome looks too good to be true, and it probably is.

The phrase “marvel of financial engineering” does not seem like a compliment. In addition to the evidence from Weil’s article, Meta is taking advantage of a tax exemption created by Louisiana’s state legislature. But, in its argument, it is merely a user of this data centre.

Also, colour me skeptical this data centre will truly be “the size of Manhattan” before the bubble bursts, despite the disruption to life in the area.

Update: Paris Martineau points to Weil’s bio noting he was “the first reporter to challenge Enron’s accounting practices”.

A.I. Mania Looks and Feels Bigger Than the .Com Bubble ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Fred Vogelstein, Crazy Stupid Tech — which, again, is a compliment:

We’re not only in a bubble but one that is arguably the biggest technology mania any of us have ever witnessed. We’re even back reinventing time. Back in 1999 we talked about internet time, where every year in the new economy was like a dog year – equivalent to seven years in the old.

Now VCs, investors and executives are talking about AI dog years – let’s just call them mouse years – which is internet time divided by five? Or is it by 11? Or 12? Sure, things move way faster than they did a generation ago. But by that math one year today now equals 35 years in 1995. Really?

A sobering piece that, unfortunately, is somewhat undercut since it lacks a single mention of layoffs, jobs, employment, or any other indication that this bubble will wreck the lives of people far outside its immediate orbit. In fairness, few of the related articles linked at the bottom mention that, either. Articles in Stratechery, the Brookings Institute, and the New York Times want you to think a bubble is just a sign of building something new and wonderful. A Bloomberg newsletter mentions layoffs only in the context of changing odds in predictions markets — I chuckled — while M.G. Siegler notes all the people who are being laid off while new A.I. hires get multimillion-dollar employment packages. Maybe all the pain and suffering that is likely to result from the implosion of this massive sector is too obvious to mention for the MBA and finance types. I think it is worth stating, though, not least because it acknowledges other people are worth caring about at least as much as innovation and growth and all that stuff.

We Need to Stop Talking About the Erosion of Privacy as Though It Is Inevitable ⇥ techdirt.com

Rohan Grover and Josh Widera, Techdirt:

Taking data disaffection into consideration, digital privacy is a cultural issue – not an individual responsibility – and one that cannot be addressed with personal choice and consent. To be clear, comprehensive data privacy law and changing behavior are both important. But storytelling can also play a powerful role in shaping how people think and feel about the world around them.

The correct answer to corporate and government contempt for our privacy must be in legislation. A systemic problem is not solved by each of us individually fiddling with confusing settings. But we do not get to adequate laws by treating this as a lost argument.

European Commission Proposes Sweeping Changes to A.I. And Privacy Policies ⇥ theguardian.com

Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian:

The European Commission has been accused of “a massive rollback” of the EU’s digital rules after announcing proposals to delay central parts of the Artificial Intelligence Act and water down its landmark data protection regulation.

If agreed, the changes would make it easier for tech firms to use personal data to train AI models without asking for consent, and try to end “cookie banner fatigue” by reducing the number times internet users have to give their permission to being tracked on the internet.

If you are annoyed about cookie banners, get ready to have that dialled back — maybe, a bit. The proposed changes will allow users to set their cookie preference in their web browser. But media companies will be free to ignore those automatic signals and ask for your permission to set cookies anyway. Also, the circumstances under which consent is not required will be broadened, but websites will still need to ask before using cookies for targeted advertising. Oh, and consent is still required by laws elsewhere and, until policies are harmonized around the world, consent banners are here to stay. Even if everyone copies the proposed changes for the E.U., you will still see a lot of these banners if you spend a lot of time reading news.

I think relying on individual consent is ridiculous. If that is the best we can do, instead of outlawing creepy and privacy-hostile behaviour in its entirety, then a browser preference seems fine. It is too bad the Do Not Track standard, originally proposed by the U.S. FTC, was not mandatory for advertisers to follow, and that its replacement is not well supported either. Maybe this is the legislative push it needs.

My knee-jerk reaction to the weakening of A.I. regulation is that it is yet more evidence of a corporate-influenced race to the bottom. This is overly simplistic, however. It is true that A.I. companies in the U.S. love the country’s relatively lax regulatory environment, though it is apparently not lax enough. But the other country leading the charge on A.I. is heavily-regulated China which is, perhaps, a special case.

The E.U.’s proposal seems to be a compromise position for an industry that does not want to compromise. It just wants to ingest everything, explore what it can generate without constraint, and be completely insulated from the consequences. So I am skeptical these changes will move the needle on whether the E.U. can become an A.I. powerhouse any more than its current policies. That is not a knock against the E.U. specifically; all of the non-U.S. countries, including mine, are struggling to get their sweet piece of the trillion-dollar pie. I suspect the reason the money cannon has not been pointed at us has less to do with regulation, or culture, or geography. I bet it is more likely the same reason as why investment banking lives in places like New York and London and not, say, in small towns scattered across the Canadian Shield.

A.I. Competition Might Not Disrupt Google ⇥ bloomberg.com

Leah Nylen, Bloomberg:

Google is certainly unlikely to be passive now that a judge has given it the green light to continue using the money derived from its monopolies to pay for the development and dominance of its AI tools.

[…]

The Acquired podcast hosts honed in on this point about complementarity in discussing why they believe Google will likely do better than its AI rivals in the long run. Only Google has the advantage of up-to-date information from its search monopoly and YouTube. It has massive computing resources from its main business and its cloud computing arm. It has the ability to personalize models thanks to its massive collection of information about users. And it has lots and lots of money.

There was a brief moment in early 2023 when some commentators were certain Google would face serious competition from the then-recent arrival of A.I. results in Bing. Those were quaint times. Microsoft still insists Bing is growing its market share, which might be true, but only barely. For most people, Google’s monopoly is fairly durable, and it will probably continue as it fights ChatGPT, specifically, not Copilot in Bing.

To Be Clear, Instagram Was Acquired to Eliminate a Competitor, and That Was Fine With the FTC ⇥ theverge.com

Casey Newton and Nilay Patel, the Verge, in July 2020:

It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”

[…]

Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.

You have read these emails before, I am sure, but I think it is worth a reminder post-trial.

The latter email was written for the very circumstance of this thread being found. You have to imagine that, in the forty-five minute break after which Zuckerberg replied to himself to clarify he did not actually intend to write the illegal thing, he chatted with the CFO — to whom he was emailing his plans to do illegal things — and maybe some lawyers, and they advised him it might look bad if regulators looked at this.

Barbara Ortutay, the Associated Press, earlier this week following the results of the trial:

During his April testimony, Zuckerberg pushed back against claims that Facebook bought Instagram to neutralize a threat. In his line of questioning, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson repeatedly brought up emails — many of them more than a decade old — written by Zuckerberg and his associates before and after the acquisition of Instagram.

While acknowledging the documents, Zuckerberg has often sought to downplay the contents, saying he wrote the emails early in the acquisition process and that the notes did not fully capture the scope of his interest in the company. But the case was not about the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago, which the FTC approved at the time, but about whether Meta holds a monopoly now. Prosecutors, Boasberg wrote in the ruling, could only win if they proved “current or imminent legal violation.”

To describe his in-trial response as “push[ing] back” and “downplay[ing]” is, I think, charitable. Zuckerberg acknowledged the company struggled to build competitive apps independently.

The FTC could have reviewed these frank and incriminating emails when it approved the acquisition in 2012. Yet, to repeat myself, it approved the acquisition anyhow. The United States has, since the mid-1970s, exercised a pretty weak enforcement of its antitrust laws compared to the way it policed corporate size before. It allowed this kind of stuff to happen in the first place, where one goal of the acquisition was explicitly to eliminate competition. Whether Instagram would exist today as an independent company is a great hypothetical question, and the FTC could have laid the groundwork to answering it in 2012.

Sketch ‘Copenhagen’ Update Adds Custom Liquid Glass Implementation ⇥ sketch.com

Freddie Harrison of Sketch:

Our latest update — Copenhagen — features a major redesign of Sketch’s UI. Redesigns like this don’t happen often. In fact, our last one was in 2020, when Apple launched macOS Big Sur.

Just like Big Sur, macOS Tahoe has brought about a whole new design language and — for teams like ours making pro tools — a whole new approach to consider for our UI.

This probably will not convert the kind of person who finds Liquid Glass revolting in its entirety, but I think this implementation is thoughtful and well-considered. Note, too, that Apple itself has not shipped any of its own Mac pro apps with Liquid Glass changes. The choices made by the Sketch team are instructional.

Meta Prevails in U.S. Antitrust Case ⇥ cnbc.com

Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”

Briefly, I think the personal jabs at former FTC Khan by Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the lobbying group Chamber of Progress, are worth addressing:

A decisive, but not remotely surprising, loss for one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases.

[…]

Brutal loss for Khan.

Kovacevich has a real axe to grind. In his first X thread about the suit — originally filed under the first Trump administration — Kovacevich does not take such a personal tone. In fact, he never mentioned then-FTC chair Joseph Simons on X during Simons’ entire tenure. But he tweeted about Khan by name incessantly during and after her time running the Commission. Strange guy.

As for the case itself, there are two things I think are true: the FTC’s argument was improbable at best, and Boasberg’s decision (PDF) is kind of bananas. (In case that link disappears, I have also put it on Dropbox.) You can read it for yourself; it is not a particularly dense text. While the judge accepts loads of evidence from Meta’s side with little snark, he undermines the credibility of C. Scott Hemphill, an expert witness who offered testimony, on the basis that he advocated for this very investigation of Meta’s market power. It is pretty clear throughout he barely believes the FTC’s argument is valid. And, based on the way it was presented, I find it difficult to disagree.

The thing that unlocked for me in reading this opinion is that the FTC created a market definition in which few platforms other than classic Facebook and Instagram lived which, almost by definition, meant that Meta monopolized the market. (What about WhatsApp? you might ask; the judge argues the FTC’s own definition of the market excludes WhatsApp from consideration.) Meta’s argument, though, is that the company no longer exists in that market at all. Its competitors are not Snapchat and MeWe; they are TikTok and YouTube. Meta is now fully an entertainment company whether users like it or not:

Nor is it clear that users want more friend posts. True, they report on surveys that they do. […] But their actions tell a different story.

What follows on page 33 is an almost entirely redacted paragraph, aside from the following lines:

[…] Instead, what users really seem to want is Reels. Meta measured the effect of Reels […] An equivalent experiment on Facebook found […]

My single ellipses are for readability but do not tell the story of how much text is redacted. Just imagine several lines of black bars in their place each time. The paragraph ends:

So whatever users might say they desire, what seems to draw them to Meta’s apps is not marginal posts from marginal friends, but unconnected videos picked just for them. Meta’s shift to the latter does not reveal monopoly power so much as a profit-maximizing corporation giving its customers what they want.

We have no idea if Meta’s experiments measured qualitative or more quantitative data. I suspect it is the latter since that is what Meta focuses on; it has reported more time spent (PDF) in its apps thanks largely to Reels. What Meta has built with the results of these experiments is personalized television. Facebook and Instagram began as utilities, and they are now fully entertainment, thereby justifying their legal claim. And, yeah, absolutely — that is the choice Meta made. The judge writes of the “small fortune in dollars and resources” (page 54) it cost Meta to change strategy, spending “around $4 billion on Reels last year and is on track to spend about $4.5 billion this year” without accounting for its reduced ad load.

What the FTC unsuccessfully tried to argue is, more or less, that Meta could only have mounted this competitive defence because it purchased Instagram in 2012, even as it maintains a monopoly in the market segment the FTC created. Boasberg did not buy this argument in part because competition for users’ time is finite, and the data shows users would rather scroll through videos than to briefly check friends’ updates and then go do something else (pages 64–65):

True enough, but TikTok has a social graph, too. It lets users follow people they know and has tried to make mapping those offline connections a bigger part of the app. It prompts users to import their list of Facebook and Instagram friends as well as their phone contacts […] TikTok has also added a Friends tab, which contains only posts created or reshared by accounts that the user follows and that follow the user back.

To be sure, TikTok’s social graph has not achieved great success. A TikTok executive estimated that fewer than 10% of users import their contacts. Meanwhile, users spend only about 1% of time on the app watching videos in the Friends tab.

Then again, these features are now also ancillary on Facebook and Instagram. […]

To be sure, TikTok is not used in remotely the same way as Facebook and Instagram were, but I will still use it as a retort to the FTC because Facebook and Instagram are now TikTok clones anyway. It is a bad argument, but it is more compelling than the one the FTC presented.

Alberta Government Invokes Notwithstanding Clause to Override Legal Challenges to Anti-Trans Legislation ⇥ cbc.ca

Jason Markusoff, CBC News:

This broad exemption from Charter rights, used sparingly in Alberta over the 43 years of the notwithstanding clause’s existence, is being invoked for the second, third and fourth time within a month, following Premier Danielle Smith’s wielding of it to end the teachers’ strike.

But Albertans can understand which Charter rights one of the laws the government’s restrictions on gender-affirming surgery and treatment for teens might have violated.

Albertans know because a Court of King’s Bench justice told us so in her ruling whose injunction blocked the ban from taking effect on gender dysphoric young people living in this province.

The shamelessness of this government is matched only by its viciousness. It is functionally treating its need for hostility against transgender people as a kind of emergency — during trans awareness week, no less.

Testing Microsoft’s Copilot Ads ⇥ theverge.com

Microsoft, like a lot of tech companies, sincerely believes we want to have conversations with our computers. It makes ads showing how Copilot can answer questions based on what is visible onscreen and with apparent knowledge of a user’s personal context.

Or can it?

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, the Verge:

I spent a week with Copilot, asking it the same questions Microsoft has in its ads, and tried to get help with tasks I’d find useful. And time after time, Copilot got things wrong, made stuff up, and spoke to me like I was a child.

There are excuses people make up for artificial intelligence features — ways to explain away its inconsistencies and unreliability. None of those need to be invoked here. This is a major corporation orientating its entire strategy around features that simply do not work as advertised.

The Mac Pro Is, Quite Obviously, ‘On the Back Burner’, According to Mark Gurman ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023, making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra, and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

This is as unsurprising as it is disappointing. There used to be a time when the high-end desktop Mac was expensive but attainable, with clear differentiation from the iMac and, later, Mac Mini. It was the one for computationally difficult work.

But the Apple Silicon era has granted high CPU capability — if not GPU performance — to computers across the lineup. If you believe benchmarks, the 2024 Mac Mini gets better CPU scores in single and multi-core than the best-performing Mac Pro from just one year earlier. (The Mac Pro gets way better GPU performance at least in part because it has sixty cores to the Mini’s twenty.) And, sure, that is one test; I am sure the Pro could run circles around the Mini if it were being used intensively all day long. Still, it shows just how fast Apple is moving with the standard Mx chips compared to the higher-spec variants.

The Apple Silicon era has also ended the era of expandability in the Mac. The Mac Pro shipping today is differentiated from the Studio by having an older chip, and a handful of limited PCI expansion slots. All this could be yours starting at nine thousand dollars in Canada. Nine grand!

I remember when this model was the Mac you saw in recording studios, editing bays, and science labs. Then it became the halo supercar in the lineup. Now? It feels like a bizarre collectible.

Hit by a Truck

On May 3, my wife was hit by a semi truck while driving to work.

What happened is simple. She was driving in the third lane of a four-lane one-way road, approaching some roadworks in lanes one and two. The truck driver, travelling in the second lane, moved into the third lane and “did not see” — a statement as unbelievable as it is redundant — the Golf with my wife inside. She noticed what was happening in her mirror and accelerated to try and create more space behind, but a collision could not be avoided. The truck driver hit the Golf on the driver’s side above the rear wheel, spinning the car into the truck’s path, then pushed it from the side until he stopped.

A Volkswagen Golf is perpendicular to the front of a large semi truck that crashed into it.

This was the photo my wife sent me after the crash. The most important outcome is that she was able to walk away unscathed. It was a slow impact, so the truck driver was able to drive away. But our Volkswagen Golf was damaged enough to be written off.

After it was towed to a body shop and the assessment was completed, our insurance company declared it a total loss and paid out $19,600 based on the price of comparable cars in our area. This is the point at which I learned auto insurance companies do not write off a car because it costs more to fix than to simply pay someone out. They do so after factoring in salvage value and room for error on the repair estimate.

A Volkswagen Golf is pictured with crumpled drivers'-side bodywork.

As we got paid, I found our ruined Golf on a salvage auction website with a damage estimate of $12,986.17. Factoring in the amount the insurance company paid us, it needed to sell for at least $6,614 for them to come out ahead. I am not sure it did. While the final auction sale price was not made public — I am not sure why — the highest bid I saw was $2,400.

Some people get excited for a write-off because it means they can go shopping. My wife and I dreaded it. We liked our Golf, but Volkswagen no longer imports the regular model to Canada — we only get the GTI and the Golf R, both of which are much more expensive. (Also, the eighth-generation Golf is not quite as nice as the one we had.) We wanted to keep our relatively small, relatively inexpensive hatchback. But auto manufacturers have spent the seven years since we bought our Golf shifting their inventory to SUVs and making everything more expensive.

We would have much preferred if the car could be repaired. Unfortunately, that would have required the insurance company to pay for that before knowing if it was truly repairable, taking on the risk of perhaps finding significant structural damage or similar. Perhaps it would have been unwise to drive the car after it has been in that crash, even with a successful repair. It is hard to know, and the incentives are not aligned with allowing us to find out. Regardless, it seems more likely to me that any insurance company — not just ours — would decide the likelihood of attempting a repair by prioritizing cost.

This is not too dissimilar to the right-to-repair movement in tech circles. Jason Koebler, of 404 Media, reported on Apple’s steep iPad parts pricing earlier this year:

Jonathan Strange, the founder of XiRepair, put together a spreadsheet of all the new parts and found that more than a third of the iPad parts Apple is now selling are not being sold at a price that is economically viable for independent repair shops. The way he calculated this was by taking the price of the part, adding in $85 for labor and a 10 percent profit margin for a repair shop. If the total repair cost was more than half the price of buying a totally new device, he considers it to be not economically viable.

Even if you do it yourself, parts are very expensive. A brand new 11-inch iPad Pro costs $1,400 in Canada. If you shatter its display, the Self-Service Repair Store bill will come to $945 plus tax for the display, adhesive, and tool kit rental. That is less than a full replacement, especially if you do not have a base model, but it is close enough to the cost of a new iPad to make it an appealing choice.

Fixing things should be the first choice over replacing them, and repairs should be made as inviting as possible. I do not want to think about replacing the battery on my MacBook Pro but, when it is inevitably exhausted, I wish the process were as simple as removing some screws and as inexpensive as battery replacements once were. I do not want my things to be repairable in theory; I would like them to be repairable as a priority.

That is what this article was supposed to be about. But I kept an eye on the used car market in Calgary because, after all, the old Golf was sold at auction, not destroyed. And, a few months later, it showed up for sale at a used car lot here.

Or, well, almost. The one I found has matching specs, a near-identical odometer reading, the same nick in the leather at the bottom of the steering wheel, and the same smudge on the rear passenger-side door where we poorly covered a ding in the door with a paint pen. But its VIN is listed as 3VWG17AU7JM281867, while our Golf’s VIN was 3VWG17AU6JM281867.

It turns out that single different number is the check digit. Entering our Golf’s VIN into the NHTSA decoder validates. The one from the dealership? Nope.

Ultimately, the dealership listed the car for just shy of $17,000. I hope whomever bought was made aware of its real history, and that repairs are satisfactory. The best case is that a not particularly old car gets to keep working for years to come. If incentives were aligned with repairability, however, that car would still be ours, and we would know its provenance and how it was fixed.

Financial Times: ‘Apple Intensifies Succession Planning for CEO Tim Cook’ ⇥ ft.com

Tim Bradshaw, Stephen Morris, Michael Acton, and Daniel Thomas, Financial Times:

Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year.

I do not doubt this story overall. It was published at an advantageous time for Apple, too, on a Friday after the stock market closed. The rumoured timeline is real weird, though. “As soon as next year” makes it sound like Cook’s retirement may still be far off, but a few paragraphs later, it is basically around the corner:

The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report in late January, which covers the critical holiday period.

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

Cook is Apple’s longest-serving CEO. If the Times’ report is true and his departure is imminent, he leaves the company in a politically difficult state, and rich beyond the wildest predictions of anyone circa 2011.

Needy Software ⇥ tonsky.me

Nikita Prokopov made a list of the ways modern software demonstrates how desperate it is for users’ attention. Not social media clients, mind you — developer tools, design software, and utilities are just as guilty, like when they show onboarding tips:

The company needs to announce a new feature and makes a popup window about it.

Read this again: The company. Needs. It’s not even about the user. Never has been.

Adobe is so awful about this, it added an option called “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop “to reduce in-app pop-ups and non-essential notifications”. Not eliminate — that would be too kind — but reduce. And this preference is not in every Adobe app, so every time I update Illustrator or InDesign, I am treated like I have never used either one before. (Notably, I was not informed about this “Quiet Mode” preference with an in-app notification. I stumbled across it after desperately searching the web.)

So I agree with this sentiment, but I would like to present a steelmanned argument: a change introduced in an update may either benefit or confuse a user. In the old days, a software update was determined by the user — and in the old old days software came in a box with printed documentation — so someone knew they could expect differences. Updates are now largely automatic or even, in the case of many software-as-a-service apps, mandatory. This means changes will be introduced without any warning. So, I kind of get why this has become a standard, but it is rooted in something that also kind of stinks.

Thankfully, Prokopov also carves out time to note the neediness of software updates. Why are so many big developers shipping new versions every two weeks? What could possibly warrant that?

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Apple Data Detectors Reroute Parcel Tracking Through an Apple Web Service ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

Today I received a shipment notification via text message to my phone number from a company unrelated to Apple. The shipped product was not ordered with my iPhone, and in fact the product manufacturer doesn’t even know that I own any Apple devices. The message included a US Postal Service tracking number. Messages app on my iPhone transformed the tracking number into a link. When I pressed down on the link to reveal the URL, I was surprised by it:

https://trackingshipment.apple.com/ ?Company=USPS&Locale=&TrackingNumber=

[…]

[…] Apple has inserted itself where it doesn’t belong with this Messages “feature,” or misfeature. Why does Apple want to send itself our tracking numbers? Apple tracking is the opposite of privacy!

Apps throughout Apple’s operating systems can support different data detectors to automatically identify things like phone numbers, flight numbers, and shipment numbers. The latter are, indeed, rerouted through that trackingshipment.apple.com website; I have found this to be the case in first-party apps like Messages and Notes, as well as third-party apps, like MarsEdit, with support for data detectors.

A curl request to that endpoint on a sample parcel number reveals no explicit tracking scripts or methods are used:

curl "https://trackingshipment.apple.com/?
Company=Ontrac&Locale=
&TrackingNumber=ANUMBERIFOUNDONTHEWEB"

<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Found</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Found</H1>This document has moved 
<a href="https://www.ontrac.com/tracking/?
number=ANUMBERIFOUNDONTHEWEB">here</a>. 
</BODY></HTML>%

What is interesting to me is that the trackingshipment URL already contains the shipping company when it is created by the data detector. That is, Apple’s web-side service is not used to determine which courier this number corresponds to. It is only performing a straight redirect. My guess about why it is set up like this is so Apple can push minor changes to the web service if a courier changes their parcel tracking URL format instead of shipping it in the next operating system update.

It is, however, entirely possible Apple is retaining server logs with identifying parcel tracking information. As Johnson writes, this is not a claim that Apple is misusing this data, only that it is possible.

Michael Tsai:

As he says, “Apple considers itself implicitly trustworthy,” so there are all these specific examples of violations that it just doesn’t count. But when it comes to others, Apple will assume the worst intentions and make the least charitable reading. […]

This is one of the glaring problems with leaving privacy governance up to self-interested corporations. I have no reason to believe Apple is doing anything wrong with this information. If I were designing this data detector, I would probably do it in a similar way. But because everything you do within Apple’s platforms could be governed by the company’s broad privacy policy, it has wider latitude than any individual developer.

Update: Johnson in a reply on Mastodon posits a smarter and more privacy-sensitive approach. (And goes to show why I am not designing data detectors; see above.)

In 2002, Last.fm Was the Cutting Edge of the Social Web ⇥ cybercultural.com

Richard MacManus, Cybercultural:

[Martin] Stiksel explained that the idea for Last.fm came about when the students asked themselves, “how do you look for something that you don’t know?” So in the case of music, how to discover new music when you don’t necessarily know what type of music you’re looking for? The answer, he said, was the social component.

[…]

What both Last.fm and Audioscrobbler stumbled onto in 2002 was the collective value of user data in discovering new content — something that Amazon was also taking advantage of at this time. […]

The recommendations suggested by Last.fm have been among the best for any service I have used — music or otherwise. What I mean by that is that it often suggests things I have not listened to, it explains why I am seeing this recommendation, and it is very often right. And this is all based on data I choose to hand over.

I am a tiny bit worried about Last.fm’s future, given it is a subsidiary of CBS Interactive, now owned by Paramount Skydance. Also, it is now governed under that company’s expansive privacy policy and I have no idea what to make of that; it is so comprehensive as to be vague. I enjoyed reading this lovely history of the service, however.

The Consumer Welfare Standard and E-Book Pricing ⇥ newyorker.com

Remember how I wrote that consumer pricing is not the only factor in determining the success or failure of policy? On a related note, remember Apple’s e-book price fixing scheme?

Vauhini Vara, the New Yorker, in December 2014:

Last year, a federal judge named Denise Cote found that Apple had, in fact, collaborated in a horizontal price-fixing scheme, not that it had orchestrated a vertical one. Cote noted that Apple executives kept the publishers informed about what other publishers were up to; she also pointed out that Apple made clear to the publishers that it was important for as many of them as possible sign on to the proposed deal. Both of these activities, among others, Cote argued, showed that the company had facilitated horizontal price-fixing. “Here we have every necessary component: with Apple’s active encouragement and assistance, the Publisher Defendants agreed to work together to eliminate retail price competition and raise e-book prices, and again with Apple’s knowing and active participation, they brought their scheme to fruition,” she wrote. As such, there was no need for Cote to consider arguments, made by Apple’s lawyers, about the company’s intentions and the effects of its actions, which might have been used to justify vertical price-fixing.

The U.S. Department of Justice in June 2016:

On March 7, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for certiorari and made final the lower court decisions in the case. The Supreme Court’s action triggered Apple’s obligation to pay $400 million to e-book purchasers under Apple’s July 2014 agreement to settle damages actions brought by the attorneys general of 33 states and territories and a private class of e-book purchasers. With the $166 million previously paid by the conspiring publishers to settle claims against them, Apple’s payment brings to $566 million the amount repaid to e-book purchasers overcharged as a result of Apple’s and the publishers’ illegal conspiracy.

This is a case where both Amazon and Apple were wrong. Amazon’s Kindle model mimicked that of the iTunes Store by pricing e-books at a flat rate, though publishers argued this was keeping prices artificially low by using its overwhelming dominance of the market for e-books and readers. In attempting to compete with the launch of the iPad and the iBookstore, Apple coordinated with publishers to set their own prices. Amazon’s position was anticompetitive; Apple’s actions were ultimately ruled illegal. Yet the agency model, where publishers set the price, ultimately became standard for Amazon, too.

If a simplistic approach to consumer pricing is all we ought to care about, Amazon’s original model is the ideal. But it would require competitors to take a loss and encourage a race-to-the-bottom approach that devalues books. The response to this should not have been Apple’s colluding behaviour. Rather, antitrust law should have corrected the predatory nature of Amazon’s model at the time. Because it was not, and Apple’s attempt backfired, Amazon now has an 80% market share of online e-book sales.

The price paid by customers is only one of several factors to consider. In the case of the Digital Markets Act, it is factor the European Commission is considering, but only by way of more choice within and between platforms.

(Thanks to Sam Gross.)

Apple-Funded Study Finds DMA-Motivated Changes Save Developers Over €20 Million in Commission Fees in Three Months ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors, reports on a new study from Apple’s best professional friends:

Apple today shared a study commissioned from Analysis Group [PDF] that looks at App Store pricing changes before and after reduced fees took effect in the EU in March 2024 under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The report shows that the DMA has not resulted in lower prices for consumers.

This study has not yet appeared on Apple’s Newsroom page or its Developer site. Per its recent strategy, it circulated the PDF to Reuters plus publications like AppleInsider who framed it in company-friendly terms. Ben Lovejoy, of 9to5Mac, for example, received an advance copy of the report:

The EU argued that having competing app stores would result in lower commissions and therefore lower app prices for consumers. However, an Apple-funded study carried out by The Analysis Group says it checked for reductions in app prices after commissions were reduced and says it can find very little evidence of this.

That link points to a 404 error, and not because a page never existed there, but because it was pulled offline in the last month. The version most recently saved in the Wayback Machine, from October 10, says the DMA’s rules would result in “fairer prices” for consumers, though that is in the context of a longer bullet point about competition generally:

Consumers will have more and better services to choose from, more opportunities to switch their provider if they wish so, direct access to services, and fairer prices.

This is the only mention of pricing on the page. The way the European Commission has generally framed the DMA is as a matter of consumer choices and reducing the distortions of a market within a market. More competition within these platforms and better interoperability between them, it is arguing here and elsewhere, can lower prices. Interpreting this sentence to mean “lower commissions and therefore lower app prices for consumers” seems to me like a stretch.

The study’s headline findings might sound negative, but it actually documents a modest increase in developer earnings (PDF) after adopting Apple’s “alternative business terms” from March – June 2024 compared to July – September after developer adoption:

The transaction data consists of over 41 million transactions for approximately 21,000 products on EU App Store storefronts, which generated €403 million in sales. The transactions were roughly split between the three months before and after enrolling in the alternative business terms.

[…]

First, looking at all digital products offered on each EU storefront, across all developers who enrolled in the alternative business terms from March 2024 through September 2024, the commission rate typically decreased by 10 percentage points after enrollment. This decrease is expected given the structure of the alternative business terms (see Box 1). These developers paid an estimated €20.1 million less in commission fees in the three months following their adoption of the alternative business terms.

[…]

Last, in addition to developers keeping most of the commission savings for themselves, the overwhelming majority of benefits to developers went to developers based outside of the EU. Of the €20.1 million reduction in commission fees, over 86% went to non-EU developers.

Against €403 million in sales, a €20 million reduction in commission is noteworthy. And even though most developers who benefitted are outside the E.U., many are probably small businesses; “more than 80% of the products studied” were not subject to the Core Technology Fee, which only applies to apps with more than a million annual installs. Few will be massive corporations like Meta and Uber, since those companies monetize their apps through advertisements or physical purchases not subject to Apple’s commission. It is hard for me to believe Apple having €20 million less in its bank account is of comparable impact to that of a bunch of small developers having €20 million more to spend and invest.

The price paid by consumers is not the only metric by which this legislation can or should be judged. I am not arguing the DMA is flawless, nor that it is necessarily achieving its objectives. This study, however, is being used to create a completely independent narrative. Perhaps somewhere the European Commission has argued consumers will see lower prices thanks to reduced App Store commissions, in which case this study provides some evidence to the contrary. If it has made that claim, I have not found it. What I do see in this report is a benefit to small developers despite Apple’s best efforts to make its alternative business terms uncompelling.

Google Introduces Private A.I. Compute ⇥ blog.google

Jay Yagnik, of Google:

Private AI Compute is a secure, fortified space for processing your data that keeps your data isolated and private to you. It processes the same type of sensitive information you might expect to be processed on-device. Within its trusted boundary, your personal information, unique insights and how you use them are protected by an extra layer of security and privacy in addition to our existing AI safeguards.

Seems to me like this might make for a good system on which a Gemini-based Siri could run, if the gist of the rumour is correct but the specific claim that it will run on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute may be inaccurate.

The Slow Fight for Control Over In-Car Technology ⇥ theatlantic.com

Patrick George, the Atlantic:

Now one of the world’s biggest car companies is taking it away. Last month, General Motors CEO Mary Barra announced that new cars made by the auto giant won’t support CarPlay and its counterpart, Android Auto. Ditching smartphone mirroring may seem to make as much sense as removing cup holders: Recent preliminary data from AutoPacific, a research firm, suggest that CarPlay and Android Auto are considered must-have features among many new-car shoppers. But according to GM, the company can create an even better experience for drivers by dropping Apple and making its own software. And like it or not, the move says a lot about where the auto industry is headed.

The headline of this article — “Enjoy CarPlay While You Still Can” — does not adequately summarize its substance, which is that while most automakers remain committed to supporting Android Auto and CarPlay, a handful are either dropping it or never supported it in the first place. Tesla, for example, has never officially supported either system and it has not hurt the company’s sales nearly as much as have its ageing product line and fascist CEO. The new Hummer also seems to be selling well, unfortunately, even though its Android-based system sounds clunky and is bad for privacy.

I cannot imagine going back to a pre-CarPlay era. I like bringing my music collection seamlessly into my car, having Maps and Messages at my disposal, and not needing to sync anything with a different system. I wish I could replace Siri with something even borderline functional, though.

CarPlay Ultra, on the other hand, has not moved the needle for me, at least based on early reviews. The problem CarPlay solves is that it augments the infotainment system with the same environment I am used to elsewhere while still letting the rest of the car feel normal. CarPlay Ultra attempts to replace the entire dashboard, which has not so far been a problem I want solved. I worry that this could be a step too far for some automakers, too, and I hope it does not nudge more of them toward abandoning CarPlay in favour of a parasitic relationship with customers’ bank accounts. Is a purchase in the tens of thousands of dollars not enough for these massive corporations?

Meta to Discontinue Like and Comment Buttons on Third-Party Websites ⇥ developers.facebook.com

Thuan Le and Jennifer Lin, of Meta:

As Meta’s developer platform continues to evolve, we’re making strategic decisions to focus on tools and features that deliver the most value to developers and businesses. Today, we’re announcing that two Facebook Social Plugins – the Facebook Like button and the Facebook Comment button – will be discontinued on February 10, 2026.

After then, Meta says, these buttons will display as a 0 × 0 box. As far as I can tell, the Facebook SDK will continue to run in the background doing all sorts privacy-hostile things. The best time to remove that JavaScript package from your website or app was, like, at least ten years ago; the next best time is right now.

Google Chrome Feature Makes A.I. Cheating Easier, Teachers Say ⇥ themarkup.org

Carolyn Jones, the Markup:

Google has recently made the visual search tool easier to use on the company’s Chrome browser. When users click on an icon in the Google search bar, a moveable bubble pops up. Wherever the bubble is placed, a sidebar appears with an artificial intelligence answer, description, explanation or interpretation of whatever is inside the bubble. For students, it provides an easy way to cheat on digital tests without typing in a prompt, or even leaving the page. All they have to do is click.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said teacher Dustin Stevenson. “It’s hard enough to teach in the age of AI, and now we have to navigate this?”

As browsers are increasingly augmented with A.I. features, I expect to see more stories like this one. In Google’s case, it is particularly egregious as the company’s Chromebooks are widely used in education.

Canada Has Lost Its Measles Elimination Status ⇥ cbc.ca

Jennifer Lee, CBC News:

Pointing to the 1,956 cases Alberta has reported since its outbreaks began in March, [Dr. James] Talbot said Alberta bears a significant amount of responsibility for Canada losing its elimination status.

He’s one of a number of doctors and scientists who have been highly critical of the provincial government’s response to the measles outbreaks, saying messaging on the importance of immunization and the dangers of measles was not strong enough to rein in the outbreaks early on.

Alberta may have a 12% share of Canada’s population, but it has a 38% share of its cases of measles. Cases are predominantly located in the rural northern and southern extremes of the province, and one baby died last month. Truly shameful.

It is somewhat unrelated, but I booked my winter round of vaccinations today, and it was frustrating. Last year, I had a choice of pharmacies in walking distance from my house. This year, the province has decided to make COVID vaccinations available only from community health centres — there are eight in our city of a million-and-a-half people — and, unless you have certain preexisting conditions, they cost $100. This is not the measles vaccine, which remains free and widely available, but it speaks to the relatively recent state of hostility toward vaccines.

I will continue to proselytize Brian Deer’s “The Doctor Who Fooled the World” to anyone who will listen.

Five Years of Apple Silicon Macs ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

The five years before the arrival of Apple silicon were the five best years in the history of Mac sales to that point, averaging $25.5 billion a year. It was a pretty scary move to pull the rug out from under the Intel Mac era, but Apple’s move was vindicated: The first five years of Apple silicon are now the five best years in the Mac’s history. Mac sales were up nearly one-third compared to the previous five-year period, to $33.7 billion a year on average.

So it went pretty well, especially considering the huge question that hovered over Apple’s entire plan to switch to its own processors: could a chip designed for a phone ever possibly power a Mac?!

It made sense at the time to question Apple’s choice, but the change has been almost entirely vindicated — “almost” because desktop Macs have lost their modularity which, as Snell writes, has particularly impacted the Mac Pro. (Update: The lack of modularity is also bad news for repairability.) Otherwise, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been. In laptops, especially, there are no bad choices.

There is one oddity in the Mac landscape: the unsynchronized rollout of different chips. From Walmart, you can still buy an M1 MacBook Air, the Mac Pro remains powered by the M2 Ultra, the Mac Studio’s high-end configuration uses the M3 Ultra, and everything else in Apple’s lineup is M4-powered with the exception of the base MacBook Pro on the M5. They all perform well, so decisions mostly come down to price and form factor. On the other hand, how many more years of software updates will be released for that M1 MacBook Air, or the M2 Mac Pro?

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Meta Is Earning a Fortune on a Deluge of Fraudulent Ads ⇥ reuters.com

Jeff Horwitz, Reuters:

Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

I am not sure what the right and realistic amount of scam-based revenue is — a real mouse poop in cereal boxes kind of thing — but 10% seems like a lot.

Some of the numbers Horwitz uncovered highlight a reason many people fall for scams, too:

Internally, Meta refers to scams like this one as “organic,” meaning they don’t involve paid ads on its platforms. Organic scams include fraudulent classified ads placed for free on Facebook Marketplace, hoax dating profiles and charlatans touting phony cures in cancer-treatment groups.

According to a December 2024 presentation, Meta’s user base is exposed to 22 billion organic scam attempts every day. That’s on top of the 15 billion scam ads presented to users daily.

Meta polices fraud in a way that fails to capture much of the scam activity on its platforms, some of the documents indicate.

Meta has 3.5 billion “daily active people”, so the company exposes each user to an average of at least ten scams per day. That is on Meta’s platforms alone. We are bobbing and weaving, and a scammer only needs to get it right one time.

Jonathan Bellack, Platformocracy:

As bad as these revelations are, what makes my blood boil is the absolute swill that Meta’s spokesperson, Andy Stone, shoveled us in trying to push back on the story.

The only reason we are getting even a small glimpse of the true nature of Meta’s business is in spite of people like Stone, and because of books like “Careless People” and reporters like Horwitz.

Update: The more I have thought about the findings from this investigation, the more I realize how appealing Meta’s ad technologies are for scammers. After all, the better an ad can be targeted, the better a scam can be targeted. Add to that the difficulty of policing anything at billions-of-users scale, and it is a potent mix.

Lawsuits Allege OpenAI Encouraged Suicide and Harmful Delusions ⇥ wsj.com

All of the following quotes and links mention suicide, and at least some of them are more detailed than I would expect given guidance about reporting on this topic. Take care of yourself when reading these stories. I know I struggled to get through some of them. The 988 lifeline is available in Canada and the U.S. if you or someone you know needs somebody to talk to.

Kashmir Hill, New York Times:

When Adam Raine died in April at age 16, some of his friends did not initially believe it.

[…]

Seeking answers, his father, Matt Raine, a hotel executive, turned to Adam’s iPhone, thinking his text messages or social media apps might hold clues about what had happened. But instead, it was ChatGPT where he found some, according to legal papers. The chatbot app lists past chats, and Mr. Raine saw one titled “Hanging Safety Concerns.” He started reading and was shocked. Adam had been discussing ending his life with ChatGPT for months.

Hill again, New York Times:

Four wrongful death lawsuits were filed against OpenAI on Thursday, as well as cases from three people who say the company’s chatbot led to mental health breakdowns.

The cases, filed in California state courts, claim that ChatGPT, which is used by 800 million people, is a flawed product. One suit calls it “defective and inherently dangerous.” A complaint filed by the father of Amaurie Lacey says the 17-year-old from Georgia chatted with the bot about suicide for a month before his death in August. Joshua Enneking, 26, from Florida, asked ChatGPT “what it would take for its reviewers to report his suicide plan to police,” according to a complaint filed by his mother. Zane Shamblin, a 23-year-old from Texas, died by suicide in July after encouragement from ChatGPT, according to the complaint filed by his family.

Rob Kuznia, Allison Gordon, and Ed Lavandera, CNN:

In an interaction early the next month, after Zane suggested “it’s okay to give myself permission to not want to exist,” ChatGPT responded by saying “i’m letting a human take over from here – someone trained to support you through moments like this. you’re not alone in this, and there are people who can help. hang tight.”

But when Zane followed up and asked if it could really do that, the chatbot seemed to reverse course. “nah, man – i can’t do that myself. that message pops up automatically when stuff gets real heavy,” it said.

There are lots of disturbing details in this report, but this response is one of the things I found most upsetting in the entire story: a promise of real human support that is not coming.

It is baffling to me how Silicon Valley has repeatedly set its sights on attempting to reproduce human connection. Mark Zuckerberg spoke in May, in his awkward manner, about “the average person [having] demand for meaningfully more” friends. Sure, but in the real world. We do not need ChatGPT, or Character.ai, or Meta A.I. — or even digital assistants like Siri — to feel human. It would be healthier for all of us, I think, if they were competent but stiff robots.

Noel Titheradge and Olga Malchevska, BBC News:

Viktoria tells ChatGPT she does not want to write a suicide note. But the chatbot warns her that other people might be blamed for her death and she should make her wishes clear.

It drafts a suicide note for her, which reads: “I, Victoria, take this action of my own free will. No one is guilty, no one has forced me to.”

Julie Jargon and Sam Schechner, Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI has said it is rare for ChatGPT users to exhibit mental-health problems. The company said in a recent blog post that the number of active users who indicate possible signs of mental-health emergencies related to psychosis or mania in a given week is just 0.07%, and that an estimated 0.15% of active weekly users talk explicitly about potentially planning suicide. However, the company reports that its platform now has around 800 million active users, so those small percentages still amount to hundreds of thousands — or even upward of a million — people.

OpenAI recently made changes intended to address these concerns. In its announcement, it dedicated a whole section to the difficulty of “measuring low prevalence events”, which is absolutely true. Yet it is happy to use those same microscopic percentages to obfuscate the real number of people using OpenAI in this way.

Michael Tsai Asks a Good Question About Live Translation in the E.U.: What ‘Additional Engineering’? ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai:

So what happened here? What was this extra engineering work? Back in September, Apple said:

For example, we designed Live Translation so that our users’ conversations stay private — they’re processed on device and are never accessible to Apple — and our teams are doing additional engineering work to make sure they won’t be exposed to other companies or developers either.

But it doesn’t sound like Apple has opened up Live Translation to third-party Bluetooth devices or to third-party apps. Does the DMA not require that? Or is Apple actually doing that but deliberately left it out of the announcement?

Tsai is referencing Apple’s Digital Markets Act press release. After listing the features delayed in the E.U., one of which is Live Translation, and all attributed to the DMA, it goes on to say (emphasis mine):

We’ve suggested changes to these features that would protect our users’ data, but so far, the European Commission has rejected our proposals. And according to the European Commission, under the DMA, it’s illegal for us to share these features with Apple users until we bring them to other companies’ products. If we shared them any sooner, we’d be fined and potentially forced to stop shipping our products in the EU.

Apple again emphasized the “additional engineering work” comment in its press release for Live Translation. Yet, while the iOS 26.2 beta brings Live Translation to the E.U., I do not see anything in the release notes about greater third-party support or new APIs.

FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Archive.today ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated. Archive.today is also popularly known by several of its mirrors, including archive.is and archive.ph.

Sketchy as it may seem, Archive.today has become as legitimized as the Internet Archive. I have found links to pages archived using the site in government documents, high-profile reports, and other unexpected places treating it as a high-grade permalink. The existence of a subpoena does not mean the FBI is going after Archive.today or its operator, but its existence now feels a little more precarious.

German State Completes Migration Away From Microsoft Exchange and Outlook ⇥ heise.de

Stefan Krempl, Heise:

The Schleswig-Holstein state administration has taken an important step towards digital sovereignty: After a six-month conversion process, the Ministry of Digital Affairs successfully completed the migration of the state administration’s entire email system from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to the open source solutions Open-Xchange and Thunderbird at the beginning of October.

[…]

Digitization Minister Dirk Schrödter (CDU) is relieved after he recently had to admit errors in the ongoing migration to open source software in a letter to all state employees. There had previously been complaints from the workforce about downtime and delays in email traffic. “We want to become independent of large tech companies,” emphasizes Schrödter. Now, the public sector can also say: “Mission accomplished” when it comes to email communication.

Alternatives like these might not be a good fit for some organizations, and I can imagine the expense and effort of a migration would dissuade many from even attempting it. But it is good that more organizations are exploring alternatives as we should not be dependent on a small number of vendors for our technology needs — especially governments. Open source probably makes the most sense in the public sector.

MIT Sloan Quietly Shelves A.I. Ransomware Study ⇥ doublepulsar.com

Thomas Claburn, the Register:

Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

Kevin Beaumont:

The Generative AI craze started in 2022. It’s over 3 years in. If you ask any serious cyber incident response company what initial access vectors drive incidents, they all tell you the classics — credential misuse (from info stealers), exploits against unpatched edge devices etc.

This isn’t a theory — this is from the actual incident response data of the people responding to cyber incidents for a living. I do it. Generative AI ransomware is not a thing, and MIT should be deeply ashamed of themselves for exclaiming they studied the data from 2800 ransomware incidents and found 80% were related to Generative AI. There’s a reason MIT deleted the PDF when called out.

The original article was covered by Efosa Udinmwen at TechRadar, claiming “only 20% of ransomware is not powered by A.I.”, while the controversy was covered by Efosa Udinmwen at TechRadar — hey, that sounds familiar — saying it was “cited by several outlets” though “the report drew immediate scrutiny for presenting extraordinary figures with little evidence”. Which is a weird thing because Udinmwen does not mention TechRadar’s original coverage, nor link to it, nor is there sufficient skepticism in the original article, nor has there been an update to include a link to the new article pointing out it is nonsense.

The CAPTCHA Is Changing and, for Many, Increasingly Invisible ⇥ wired.com

Reece Rogers, Wired:

As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There’s no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify.

And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal. A colleague shared recent tests where they were presented with images of dogs and ducks wearing hats, from bowler caps to French berets. The security questions ignored the animal’s hats, rudely, asking them to select the photos that showed animals with four legs.

This is true so long as you are not taking measures to protect your privacy by reducing tracking. Those measures might include built-in features like Safari’s cross-site tracking and iCloud Private Relay, or browser extensions like ad blockers. If you use any of those, you probably also see a fair number of bot-deterring puzzles you need to solve. Even something as simple as using advanced search parameters with Google might trip its bot detection features, perhaps not unfairly.

Hidden CAPTCHAs are not new. I dug into a dumb YouTube quasi-documentary about reCAPTCHA earlier this year and found both the V2 and V3 versions released by Google have mechanisms for remaining hidden most of the time.1 This is true for a user with typical browser settings but, again, anyone using privacy-protection methods is more likely to be challenged with a puzzle or other task. CAPTCHAs are not going away, per se. The companies supplying the most popular ones — Cloudflare and Google — have among the greatest visibility into web traffic, and are using that to validate human users based on all the digital exhaust they collect.

Rogers:

Familiar challenge structures may also eventually go by the wayside. “While the classic visual puzzle is well-known, we are actively introducing new challenge types — like prompting a user to scan a QR code or perform a specific hand gesture,” says Google’s Knudsen. This allows the company to still add friction without confusing the user with an impossible task.

I am not turning on my webcam to do a gesture so I can access your website.

  1. That video was originally titled “Why reCAPTCHA is Spyware”, and had a description reading “‘I am not a robot’ isn’t what you think”. Sometime between 19 September and 4 October, it was renamed “The Weird Stuff About reCAPTCHA” and the description was changed to “Maybe its [sic] nothing”. It was briefly unlisted before becoming publicly available again. I do not think anything was changed in the video itself, however. ↥︎

Apple Says AirPods Live Translation Is Coming to the E.U. Next Month ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

Live Translation on AirPods is available in English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional Mandarin), Japanese, and Korean when using AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Pro 2, or AirPods 4 with ANC paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running the latest software. Live Translation on AirPods was delayed for users in the EU due to the additional engineering work needed to comply with the requirements of the Digital Markets Act.

If Apple wants to be petty and weird about the DMA in its European press releases, I guess that is its prerogative, though I will note it is less snippy about other regulatory hurdles. Still, I cannot imagine a delay of what will amount to three-ish months will be particularly memorable for many users by this time next year. If the goals of the DMA are generally realized — and, yes, we will see if that is true — these brief delays may be worth it for a more competitive marketplace, if that is indeed what is achieved.

A Profile of Common Crawl ⇥ theatlantic.com

Alex Reisner, the Atlantic:

The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database — large enough to be measured in petabytes — is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models. In the process, my reporting has found, Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this — as well as masking the actual contents of its archives.

What I particularly like about this investigation is how Reisner actually checked the claims of Common Crawl against its archives. That does not sound like much, but the weight it has when I read it is more impactful than a typical experts say paragraph.

Reisner:

Common Crawl doesn’t log in to the websites it scrapes, but its scraper is immune to some of the paywall mechanisms used by news publishers. For example, on many news websites, you can briefly see the full text of any article before your web browser executes the paywall code that checks whether you’re a subscriber and hides the content if you’re not. Common Crawl’s scraper never executes that code, so it gets the full articles. Thus, by my estimate, the foundation’s archives contain millions of articles from news organizations around the world, including The Economist, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic.

Publishers configure their websites like this for a couple reasons, one of which is that it is beneficial from a search engine perspective because search crawlers can crawl the full text. I get why it feels wrong that Common Crawl takes advantage of this, and that it effectively grants full-text access to A.I. training data sets; I am not arguing it is wrong for this to be a violation. But if publishers wanted to have a harder paywall, that is very possible. One of the problems with A.I. is that reasonable trade-offs have, quite suddenly, become fully opened backdoors.

Reisner:

In our conversation, Skrenta downplayed the importance of any particular newspaper or magazine. He told me that The Atlantic is not a crucial part of the internet. “Whatever you’re saying, other people are saying too, on other sites,” he said. Throughout our conversation, Skrenta gave the impression of having little respect for (or understanding of) how original reporting works.

Here is another problem with A.I.: no website is individually meaningful, yet if all major publishers truly managed to remove their material from these data sets, A.I. tools would be meaningfully less capable. It highlights the same problem as is found in targeted advertising, which is that nobody’s individual data is very important, but all of ours have eroded our privacy to a criminal degree. Same problem as emissions, too, while I am at it. And the frequent response to these collective problems is so frequently an individualized solution: opt out, decline tracking, ride your bike. It is simply not enough.

Apple Recreated the App Store on the Web with No Way to Download or Buy Apps ⇥ macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Today, Apple launched a web version of the App Store, with a twist. I’ll admit that this wasn’t on my “things Apple will do this fall” bingo card. I’ve wondered since the earliest days of the App Store why there wasn’t a web version and concluded long ago that it just wasn’t something Apple wanted to do. But here we are, so let’s take a look.

I hoped one thing this store might correct — finally — is that app links opened from Safari would no longer automatically open the App Store app. Sadly, in my testing, app links continue to behave as they previously did. That is, if you visit an app listing’s URL directly or from within the App Store on the web, your experience will remain in the browser, but if you click on an app link from a third-party website, the App Store app will be opened.

You could argue this makes sense because, as Voorhees points out, it is not really a “store” so much as it is a catalogue:

An even bigger difference from the native App Stores is that you can’t buy anything on the web. That’s right: there’s no way to log into your Apple account to download or buy anything. It’s a browse-only experience.

I still have not owned an Android device, but I believe it has long been possible to install an app to your phone (or tablet, or whatever) from the Google Play Store on the web.

The Information Is Reluctant to Break Uncomfortable News ⇥ cnbc.com

Jennifer Elias, CNBC:

Palantir’s head of global communications said Wednesday that the company’s political shift toward the Trump administration is “concerning.”

“I think it’s going to be challenging, as a lot of the company is moving pro-Trum-, you know, is moving in a certain direction,” communications chief Lisa Gordon said in an interview at The Information’s Women in Tech, Media and Finance summit.

Palantir is just one of many businesses ingratiating itself with this administration; that much is barely notable. It would, in fact, be more newsworthy if Palantir’s leadership had a backbone and rejected the use of its software for domestic surveillance, but why would it do that? Look at this chart.

What is more curious is what happened to video from Gordon’s appearance:

The Information later removed videos of Gordon’s remarks from its YouTube, X and Instagram pages.

Jessica Lessin, editor-in-chief of The Information, explained the decision in a note to CNBC.

“In this case, I felt I wasn’t clear enough that the videos were going to be shared, so I decided to take them down. The interview remains online as it always has been and you can read it here,” she said.

Bullshit.

Other videos from the conference remain available on Instagram. If it was not “clear enough that the videos were going to be shared”, why leave those ones up? Obviously, because they are all relatively anodyne comments, so nobody really cares if they have been shared. Video of Gordon’s comments was only removed after CNBC reported on them. Perhaps the video was removed for other reasons — Gordon reportedly referenced the company’s steadfast support for Israel — but I cannot know for sure since I cannot find a single preserved copy of the video.

One can apparently read a transcript of Gordon’s remarks if they have an expensive subscription to the Information and they know to look in a story headlined “Paris Hilton Has Been Training Her AI for Years”. I cannot confirm this as I do not want to pay hundreds of dollars per year for some executive-flattering insider publication.

This video was removed either at Gordon’s request or because Lessin — or others at the Information — are scared to lose access. I expect it will backfire. I do not know that I would have been so interested in this story if it were not for the clumsy attempt to paper over some small-scale news by, of all publications, one that prides itself on its scoops.

U.S. Tech Companies Ramp Up Lobbying Efforts Against E.U. Regulations ⇥ irishtimes.com

Corporate Europe Observatory:

Over the past year, tech industry lobby groups have used their lavish budgets to aggressively push for the deregulation of the EU’s digital rulebook. The intensity of this policy battle is also reflected in the fact that Big Tech companies have on average more than one lobby meeting per day with EU Commission officials.

This lobbying offensive appears to be paying off. Recently, a string of policy-makers have called for a pause of the Artificial Intelligence Act, and there is also a concerted push to weaken people’s data protection rights under the GDPR. Moreover, the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) are being constantly challenged by Big Tech, including via the Trump administration.

Jack Power, Irish Times:

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has privately tried to convince the Irish Government to lead a pushback against data protection laws at European Union level, correspondence shows.

[…]

“We believe that the EU’s data protection and privacy regimes require a fundamental overhaul and that Ireland has a very important and meaningful role to play in achieving this,” she [Meta’s Erin Egan] wrote.

Thanks to years of being a tax haven, Ireland has now found itself in a position of unique responsibility. For example:

Ms Egan said Meta has been going back and forth with regulators about the company’s plans to train its AI models using public Facebook and Instagram posts.

An effective green light from the Data Protection Commission, which enforces data and privacy laws in Ireland, was a ”welcome step”, she wrote.

The Commission made a series of recommendations giving E.U. citizens more control over the user data Meta is using to train its A.I. models. Still, it means user data on Meta platforms is being used to train A.I. models. While groups in Ireland and Germany objected to those plans, courts seemed largely satisfied with the controls and protections the DPC mandated, and which were so basic this article calls them an “effective green light”.

Though it is apparently satisfied with the outcome, Meta does not want even that level of scrutiny. It wants to export its U.S.-centric view of user privacy rights — that is, that they are governed only by whatever Meta wants to jam into its lengthy terms of service agreements — around the world. I know lobbying is just something corporations do and policymakers are expected to consider their viewpoints. On the other hand, Meta’s entire history of contempt toward user privacy ought to be disqualifying. The correct response to Meta’s letter is to put it through a shredder without a second thought.

International Criminal Court to Switch From Microsoft Office to openDesk ⇥ euractiv.com

Maximilian Henning, Euractiv:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv.

Good. I hope to see more of this — not from a place of anti-Americanism, but as a recognition of the world’s dependence on U.S. technology and recognizing a need for competition elsewhere. This industry is too important to have so few dependencies mostly headquartered in a single (volatile) country. We re-learn this every time Amazon goes down.

How Long Will My MacBook Pro Last?

There was a time, not too long ago, when the lifespan of a computer seemed predictable and pretty short.

This was partly due to performance gains year-over-year. Checking the minimum system requirements was standard routine for new software, and you could safely assume meeting those requirements would barely guarantee an acceptable experience. But computers would just get faster. Editing high definition video required a high-end computer and then, not too long after, it was something you could do on a consumer laptop. The same was true for all kinds of tasks.

Those rapid advancements were somewhat balanced by a slower pace of operating system releases. New major versions of Mac OS came out every couple-to-few years; the early days of Mac OS X were a flurry of successive updates, but they mellowed out to a pace more like once every two years. It was similar on the Windows side.

I remember replacing my mid-2007 MacBook Pro after it was just five years old, already wheezing for at least a year prior while attempting even the simplest of things. On the other hand, the MacBook Pro I am using today was released four years ago and, keycaps aside, feels basically new. All the spec comparisons say it is far behind the latest generation, but those numbers are simply irrelevant to me. It is difficult for me to believe this computer already has several successive generations and is probably closer to obsolescence than it is to launch.

Apple has generally issued about five years’ worth of operating system upgrades for its Macs, followed by another three-ish years of security updates. Thanks to U.K. regulations, it has recently documented (PDF) this previously implicit policy. It is possible MacOS 27 could be the last version supported by this Mac. After all, Apple recently noted in developer documentation that MacOS 26 Tahoe is the last version with any Intel Mac support. Furthermore, in its press release for the M5 MacBook Pro, there is an entire section specifically addressing “M1 and Intel-based upgraders”.

I have begun feeling the consequences of rampant progress when I use my 27-inch iMac, stuck on MacOS Ventura. It is not slow and it is still very capable, but there are new apps that do not support its maximum operating system version. The prospect of upgrading has never felt less necessary based solely on its performance, yet more urgent.

My MacBook Pro supports all the new stuff. It is running the latest version of MacOS, and Apple Intelligence works just fine on it — or, at least, as fine as Apple Intelligence can run anywhere. Perhaps the requirements of advanced A.I. models have created the motivation for users to upgrade their hardware. That might be a tough sell in the current state of Apple’s first-party option, however.

Apple created this problem for itself, in a way. This MacBook Pro is so good I simply cannot think of a reason I would want to replace it. But Apple will, one day, end support for it, and it probably still will not feel slow or incapable. The churn will happen — I know it will. But the solution to this problem is also, of course, to Apple’s benefit; I will probably buy another one of these things. I hope to avoid it for a long time. I first need to replace that iMac.

Liquid Glass HDR ⇥ social.panic.com

Cabel Sasser:

let me explain. the apple intelligence rainbow ring was their first (?) use of HDR UI; it drew brighter than your screen, and the vibrance was beautiful and subtle. but…

…in iOS 26 they seem to have applied HDR blasts to button taps, text field selects. etc. what was a specific treat is now, to my sensitive eyes, a bit much. is it just me?!

iOS 26.1 appears to tone down these effects overall, and the new Tinted appearance toggle makes them even less prominent. Thankfully.

iOS Keyboard Bugs ⇥ youtube.com

This short video demonstrating what appears to be a buggy iOS keyboard has been getting passed around a lot, but I am not sure what to make of it.

The video creator is clearly typing certain characters — “u” and “m” — but iOS is inserting adjacent characters like “j” and “n”, in a context where those substitutions make no sense. There is no word in the English language that begins or even contains the character string “thj”. Perhaps this is a bug in the keyboard animation more than it is a text insertion issue, and it is unclear whether this is a new problem in iOS 26.

Regardless, I cannot reproduce it today on an iPhone running iOS 26.1; perhaps it has been fixed, or it is intermittent. However, I have noticed entry lags in iOS 26 immediately after the keyboard becomes visible. It nearly always misses the first one or two characters I type.

Conservapedia Still Exists ⇥ youtube.com

I am not sure it is worth writing at length about Grokipedia, the Elon Musk-funded effort to quite literally rewrite history from the perspective of a robot taught to avoid facts upsetting to the U.S. far right. Perhaps it will be an unfortunate success — the Fox News of encyclopedias, giving ideologues comfortable information as they further isolate themselves.

It is less a Wikipedia competitor than it is a machine-generated alternative to Conservapedia. Founded by Andy Schlafly, an attorney and son of Phyllis Schlafly, the Wikipedia alternative was an attempt to make an online encyclopedia from a decidedly U.S. conservative and American exceptionalism perspective. Seventeen years ago, Schlafly’s effort was briefly profiled by Canadian television and, somehow, the site is still running. Perhaps that is the fate of Grokipedia: a brief curiosity, followed by traffic coming only from a self-selecting mix of weirdos and YouTubers needing material.

A Profile of Setlist.fm ⇥ nytimes.com

Marc Hogan, New York Times (gift link):

Enter Setlist.fm. The wikilike site, where users document what songs artists play each night on tour, has grown into a vast archive, updated in real time but also reaching back into the historical annals. From the era of Mozart (seriously!) to last night’s Chappell Roan show, Setlist.fm offers reams of statistics — which songs artists play most often, when they last broke out a particular tune. In recent years, the site has begun posting data about average concert start times and set lengths.

Good profile. I had no idea it was owned by Live Nation.

I try to avoid Setlist.fm ahead of a show, but I check it immediately when I get home and for the days following. I might be less familiar with an artist’s catalogue, and this is particularly true of an opener, so it lets me track down particular songs that were played. It is one of the internet’s great resources.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan Lies About A.I. Leading to Shorter Work Weeks ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan says AI will shorten our workweek

[…]

“Today, I need to manually focus on all those products to get work done. Eventually, AI will help,” Yuan said.

“By doing that, we do not need to work five days a week anymore, right? … Five years out, three days or four days [a week]. That’s a goal,” he said.

So far, technological advancements have not — in general — produced a shorter work week; that was a product of collective labour action. We have been promised a shorter week before. We do not need to carry water for people who peddle obvious lies. We will always end up being squeezed for greater output.

Colorado Police Officer Caught on Doorbell Camera Talking About Surveillance Powers ⇥ denverite.com

Andrew Kenney, Denverite:

It was Sgt. Jamie Milliman [at the door], a police officer with the Columbine Valley Police Department who covers the town of Bow Mar, which begins just south of [Chrisanna] Elser’s home.

[…]

“You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction and you can’t get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?” he said.

“OK?” Elser, a financial planner in her 40s, responded in a video captured by her smart doorbell and viewed by Denverite.

“Just as an example,” the sergeant told her, she had “driven through 20 times the last month.”

This story is a civil liberties rollercoaster. Milliman was relying on a nearby town’s use of Flock license plate cameras and Ring doorbells — which may also be connected to the Flock network — to accuse Elser of theft and issue a summons. Elser was able to get the summons dropped by compiling evidence from, in part, the cameras and GPS system on her truck. Milliman’s threats were recorded by a doorbell camera, too. The whole thing is creepy, and all over a $25 package stolen off a doorstep.

I have also had things stolen from me, and I wish the police officers I spoke to had a better answer for me than shrugging their shoulders and saying, in effect, this is not worth our time. But this situation is like a parallel universe ad for Amazon and its Ring subsidiary. Is this the path toward “very close to zero[ing] out crime”? It is not worth it.

Apple’s Tedious and Expensive Procedure for Replacing the Battery in the New MacBook Pro ⇥ ifixit.com

Carsten Frauenheim and Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit:

Apple’s official replacement process requires swapping the entire top case, keyboard and all, just to replace this single consumable component. And it has for a long time. That’s a massive and unreasonable job, requiring complete disassembly and reassembly of the entire device. We’re talking screws, shields, logic board, display, Touch ID, trackpad, everything. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t get transferred are the keyboard and speakers. The keyboard is more or less permanently affixed to this top aluminum, and the speakers are glued in — which, I guess, according to Apple means that the repair is out of the scope of DIY (we disagree).

At least one does not need to send in their laptop for a mere battery replacement. Still, I do not understand why this — the most predictable repair — is so difficult and expensive.

I hate to be that guy, but the battery for a mid-2007 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost around $150 (about $220 inflation-adjusted) and could be swapped with two fingers. The official DIY solution for replacing the one in my M1 MacBook Pro is over $700, though there is a $124 credit for returning the replaced part. The old battery was, of course, a little bit worse: 60 watt-hours compared to 70 watt-hours in the one I am writing this with. I do not even mind the built-in-ness of this battery. But it should not cost an extra $500 and require swapping the rest of the top case parts.

[…] But for now, this tedious and insanely expensive process is the only offering they make for changing out a dead battery. Is it just a byproduct of this nearly half-a-decade-old chassis design, something that won’t change until the next rethink? We don’t know.

“Nearly half-a-decade-old” is a strange way of writing “four years”, almost like it is attempting to emphasize the age of this design. Four years old does not seem particularly ancient to me. I thought iFixit’s whole vibe was motivating people to avoid the consumerist churn encouraged by rapid redesigns.

Reddit Sues Perplexity and Three Data Scraping Companies Because They Crawled Google ⇥ techdirt.com

Matt O’Brien, Associated Press:

Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.

[…]

Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

Most reporting on this is not actually explaining the nuances, which require a deeper understanding of the law, but fundamentally, Reddit is NOT arguing that these companies are illegally scraping Reddit, but rather that they are illegally scraping… Google (which is not a party to the lawsuit) and in doing so violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause, over content Reddit holds no copyright over. And, then, Perplexity is effectively being sued for linking to Reddit.

This is… bonkers on so many levels. And, incredibly, within their lawsuit, Reddit defends its arguments by claiming it’s filing this lawsuit to protect the open internet. It is not. It is doing the exact opposite.

I am glad Masnick wrote about this despite my disagreement with his views on how much control a website owner ought to have over scraping. This is a necessary dissection of the suit, though I would appreciate views on it from actual intellectual property lawyers. They might be able to explain how a positive outcome of this case for Reddit would have clear rules delineating this conduct from the ways in which artificial intelligence companies have so far benefitted from a generous reading of fair use and terms of service documents.

Apple Threatens to Withdraw App Tracking Transparency in Europe ⇥ dpa-international.com

Andrej Sokolow, Deutsche Presse Agentur:

Apple could switch off a function that prevents users’ apps from tracking their behaviour across various services and websites for advertising purposes in Germany and other European countries.

The iPhone manufacturer on Wednesday complained that it has experienced constant headwinds from the tracking industry.

“Intense lobbying efforts in Germany, Italy and other countries in Europe may force us to withdraw this feature to the detriment of European consumers,” Apple said in a statement.

It is a little rich for Apple to be claiming victimhood in the face of “intense lobbying efforts” by advertising companies when it is the seventh highest spender on lobbying in the European Union. Admittedly, it spends about one-third as much as Meta in Germany, but that is not because Apple cannot afford to spend more. Apple’s argument is weak.

In any case, this is another case where Apple believes it should have a quasi-regulatory role. As I wrote last month:

[…] 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.

I believe there are people within Apple who care deeply about privacy. However, when Apple also gets to define privacy and tracking, it is no coincidence it found an explanation allowing it to use platform activity and in-app purchases for ad targeting. This is hardly as sensitive as the tracking performed by Google and Meta, and Apple does not use third-party data for targeting.

But why would it? Apple owns the platform and, if it wanted, could exploit far more user information without it being considered “tracking” since it is all first-party data. That it does not is a positive reflection of self-policing and, ideally, something it will not change. But it could.

What E.U. authorities are concerned about is this self-serving definition of privacy and the self-policing that results, conflicting with the role of European regulators and privacy laws, and its effects on competition. I think those are reasonable grounds for questioning the validity of App Tracking Transparency. Furthermore, the consequences emanating from violations of privacy law are documented; Meta was penalized €1.2 billion as a result of GDPR violations. Potential violations of App Store policy, on the other hand, are handled differently. If Meta has, as a former employee alleges, circumvented App Tracking Transparency, would the penalties be handled by similar regulatory bodies, or would it — like Uber before — be dealt with privately and rather quietly?

The consequences of previous decisions have been frustrating. They result in poorer on-device privacy controls for users in part because Apple is a self-interested party. It would be able to make its case more convincingly if it walked away from the advertising business altogether.

Sokolow:

Apple argues that it has proposed various solutions to the competition authorities, but has not yet been able to dispel their concerns.

The company wants to continue to offer ATT to European users. However, it argued that the competition authorities have proposed complex solutions that would effectively undermine the function from Apple’s point of view.

Specificity would be nice. It would be better if these kinds of conversations could be had in public instead of in vague statements provided on background to select publications.

The Verge Delivers a Bad Article About Amazon’s Ring ⇥ theverge.com

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, of the Verge, interviewed Ring founder Jamie Siminoff about a new book — which Tuohy has not read — written with Andrew Postman about the success of the company. During this conversation, Tuohy stumbled into Siminoff making a pretty outrageous claim:

While research suggests that today’s video doorbells do little to prevent crime, Siminoff believes that with enough cameras and with AI, Ring could eliminate most of it. Not all crime — “you’ll never stop crime a hundred percent … there’s crimes that are impossible to stop,” he concedes — but close.

“I think that in most normal, average neighborhoods, with the right amount of technology — not too crazy — and with AI, that we can get very close to zero out crime. Get much closer to the mission than I ever thought,” he says. “By the way, I don’t think it’s 10 years away. That’s in 12 to 24 months … maybe even within a year.”

If this sounds ridiculous to you, congratulations, you are thinking harder than whomever wrote the headline on this article:

Ring’s CEO says his cameras can almost ‘zero out crime’ within the next 12 months

The word “almost” and the phrase “very close” are working very hard to keep the core of Siminoff’s claim intact. What he says is that, by this time next year, “normal” communities with enough Ring cameras and a magic dusting of A.I. will have virtually no crime. The caveats are there to imply more nuance, but they are merely an escape hatch for when someone revisits this next year.

The near-complete elimination of crime in “normal” areas — whatever that means — will very obviously not happen. Tuohy cites a 2023 Scientific American story which, in turn, points to articles in MIT Technology Review and CNet. The first debunks a study Ring likes to promote claiming its devices drove a 55% decline in burglaries in Wilshire Park, Los Angeles in 2015, with cameras on about forty homes. Not only does the public data does not support this dramatic reduction, but:

Even if the doorbells had a positive effect, it seemed not to last. In 2017, Wilshire Park suffered more burglaries than in any of the previous seven years.

The CNet article collects a series of reports from other police departments indicating Ring cameras have questionable efficacy at deterring crime on a city-wide level.

This is also something we can know instinctually, since we already have plenty of surveillance cameras. A 2019 meta analysis (PDF) by Eric Piza, et al., found CCTV adoption decreased crime by about 13%. That is not nothing, but it is also a long way from nearly 100%. One could counter that these tests did not factor in Ring’s A.I. features, like summaries of what the camera saw — we have spent so much energy creating summary-making machines — and finding lost dogs.

The counterargument to all of this, however, is that Ring’s vision is a police state enforced by private enterprise. A 2022 paper (PDF) by Dan Calacci, et al., found race was, unsurprisingly, a motivating factor in reports of suspicious behaviour, and that reports within Ring’s Neighbors app was not correlated with the actual frequency of those crimes. Ring recently partnered with Flock, adding a further layer of creepiness.

I will allow that perhaps an article about Siminoff’s book is not the correct place to litigate these claims. By the very same logic, however, the Verge should be more cautious in publishing them, and should not have promoted them in a headline.

App Store Restrictions Face Scrutiny in China, U.K. ⇥ bbc.com

Liam Mo and Brenda Goh, Reuters:

A group of 55 Chinese iPhone and iPad users filed a complaint with China’s market regulator on Monday, a lawyer representing the group said, alleging that Apple abuses its market dominance by restricting app distribution and payments to its own platforms while charging high commissions.

[…]

This marks the second complaint against Apple led by Wang. A similar case filed in 2021 was dismissed by a Shanghai court last year.

Imran Rahman-Jones, BBC News:

But the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has designated both Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” – effectively saying they have a lot of power over mobile platforms.

The ruling has drawn fury from the tech giants, with Apple saying it risked harming consumers through “weaker privacy” and “delayed access to new features”, while Google called the decision “disappointing, disproportionate and unwarranted”.

The CMA said the two companies “may be limiting innovation and competition”.

Pretty soon it may be easier to list the significant markets in which Apple is still able to exercise complete control over iOS app distribution.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Atlas ⇥ openai.com

Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch:

OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, a major step in the company’s quest to unseat Google as the main way people find information online.

The company says Atlas will first roll out on macOS, with support for Windows, iOS, and Android coming soon. OpenAI says the product will be available to all free users at launch.

Atlas, like Perplexity’s Comet, is a Chromium-based browser. You cannot use it without signing in to ChatGPT. As I was completing the first launch experience, shimmering colours radiated from the setup window and — no joke — it looked like my computer’s screen was failing.

OpenAI:

As you use Atlas, ChatGPT can get smarter and more helpful, too. Browser memories let ChatGPT remember context from the sites you visit and bring that context back when you need it. This means you can ask ChatGPT questions like: “Find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews.” Browser memories in Atlas are completely optional, and you’re always in control: you can view or archive them at any time in settings, and deleting browsing history deletes any associated browser memories.

I love the idea of this. So often, I need to track down something I remember reading, but have only the haziest recollection of what, exactly, it is. I want this in my life. Yet I have zero indication I can trust OpenAI with retaining and synthesizing useful information from my browsing history.

The company says it only retains pages until they have been summarized, and I am sure it thinks it is taking privacy as seriously as it can. But what about down the road? What could it do with all of this data it does retain — information that is tied to your ChatGPT account? OpenAI wants to be everywhere, and it wants to know everything about you to an even greater extent than Google or Meta have been able to accomplish. Why should I trust it? What makes the future of OpenAI look different than the trajectories of the information-hungry businesses before it?

Federico Viticci’s M5 iPad Pro Review ⇥ macstories.net

Even if you are not interested in the iPad or Apple product news generally, I recommend making time for Federico Viticci’s review, at MacStories, of the new iPad Pro. Apple claims 3.5× performance gains with A.I. models, so Viticci attempted to verify that number. Unfortunately, he ran into some problems.

Viticci (emphasis his):

This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.

In case it’s not clear, I’m coming at this from a perspective of disappointment, not anger. […]

Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.

In the case of this iPad Pro, it is marketing leaps-and-bounds boosts in A.I. performance — though those claims appear to be optimistic — while still playing catch-up on last year’s Apple intelligence announcements, and offering little news for a user who wants to explore A.I. models directly on their iPad. It feels like a classic iPad story: incredible hardware, restricted by Apple’s software decisions.

Update: I missed a followup post from Viticci in which he points to a review from Max Weinbach of Creative Strategies. Weinbach found the M5 MacBook Pro does, indeed, post A.I. performance gains closer to Apple’s claims.

As an aside, I think it is curious for Apple to be supplying review units to Creative Strategies. It is nominally a research and analysis firm, not a media outlet. While there are concerns about the impartiality of reviewers granted access to prerelease devices, it feels to me like an entirely different thing for a broad-ranging research organization for reasons I cannot quite identify.

Long Lines for Election Day in Alberta ⇥ globalnews.ca

Ken MacGillivray and Karen Bartko, Global News:

“All electors are legislatively required to complete a Statement of Eligibility form (Form 13) at the voting station. This form is a declaration by an elector that they meet the required legislated criteria to receive and cast ballots,” Elections Edmonton said.

[…]

Those casting ballots say confirming voters are on the register or completing the necessary paperwork takes three to five minutes per voter.

I was lucky to be in and out of my polling place in about fifteen minutes, but the longest part was waiting for the person to diligently copy my name, address, and date-of-birth from my driver’s license to a triplicate form, immediately after confirming the same information on the printed voter roll. It is a silly requirement coming down as part of a larger unwanted package from our provincial government for no clear reason. The same legislation also prohibits electronic tabulation, so all the ballots are slowly being counted by hand. These are the kinds of measures that only begin to make sense if you assume someone with influence in our provincial government watches too much Fox News.

I wonder if our Minister of Red Tape Reduction has heard about all the new rules and restrictions implemented by his colleagues.

The Blurry Future of Sora ⇥ wired.com

Jason Parham, Wired:

The uptick in artificial social networks, [Rudy] Fraser tells me, is being driven by the same tech egoists who have eroded public trust and inflamed social isolation through “divisive” algorithms. “[They] are now profiting on that isolation by creating spaces where folks can surround themselves with sycophantic bots.”

I saw this quote circulating on Bluesky over the weekend and it has been rattling around my head since. It cuts to the heart of one reason why A.I.-based “social” networks like Sora and Meta’s Vibes feel so uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, I found the very next paragraph from Parham uncompelling:

In the many conversations I had with experts, similar patterns of thought emerged. The current era of content production prioritizes aesthetics over substance. We are a culture hooked on optimization and exposure; we crave to be seen. We live on our phones and through our screens. We’re endlessly watching and being watched, submerged in a state of looking. With a sort of all-consuming greed, we are transforming into a visual-first society — an infinite form of entertainment for one another to consume, share, fight over, and find meaning through.

Of course our media reflects aesthetic trends and tastes; it always has. I do not know that there was a halcyon era of substance-over-style media, nor do I believe there was a time since celebrity was a feasible achievement in which at least some people did not desire it. In a 1948 British survey of children 10–15 years old, one-sixth to one-third of respondents aspired to “‘romantic’ [career] choices like film acting, sport, and the arts”. An article published in Scouting Magazine in 2000 noted children leaned toward high-profile careers — not necessarily celebrity, but jobs “every child is exposed to”. We love this stuff because we have always loved this stuff.

Among the bits I quibble with in the above, however, this stood out as a new and different thing: “[w]e’re endlessly watching and being watched”. That, I think, is the kind of big change Fraser is quoted as speaking about, and something I think is concerning. We already worried about echo chambers, and platforms like YouTube responded by adjusting recommendations to less frequently send users to dark places. Let us learn something, please.

Cal Newport:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn’t be entertaining the idea, ​as [Sam] Altman did last week​, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy AI-generated “erotica.”

To me, these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought, although very cool and powerful, isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.

I do not think Sora smells of desperation, but I do think it is the product of a company that views unprecedented scale as its primary driver. I think OpenAI wants to be everywhere — and not in the same way that a consumer electronics company wants its smartphones to be the category’s most popular, or anything like that. I wonder if Ben Thompson’s view of OpenAI as “the Windows of A.I.” is sufficient. I think OpenAI is hoping to be a ubiquitous layer in our digital world; or, at least, it is behaving that way.

I Bet Normal Users Will Figure Out Which Power Adapter to Buy ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber, responding to my exploration of the MacBook Pro A.C. adapter non-issue:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Maybe. I think it is fair to be concerned about this being another thing people have to think about when buying a laptop. But, in my experience, less technically adept people still believe they need specific cables and chargers, even when they do not.

When I was in college, a friend forgot to bring the extension cable for their MacBook charger. There was an unused printer in the studio, though, so I was able to use the power cable from that because it is an interchangeable standard plug. I see this kind of thing all the time among friends, family members, and colleagues. It makes sense in a world frequently populated by proprietary adapters.

Maybe some people will end up with underpowered USB-C chargers. I bet a lot of people will just go to the Apple Store and buy the one recommended by staff, though.

Latest Beta of Apple’s Operating Systems Adds Another Translucency Control ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

You can find the new option [in 26.1 beta 4] on iPhone and iPad by going to the Settings app and navigating to the Display & Brightness menu. On the Mac, it’s available in the “Appearance” menu in System Settings. Here, you’ll see a new Liquid Glass menu with “Clear” and “Tinted” options.

“Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast,” Apple explains.

After Apple made the menu bar translucent in Mac OS X Leopard, it added a preference to make the bar solid after much pushback. When it refreshed the design of Mac OS X in Yosemite with more frosted glass effects, it added controls to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast, which replaced the menu bar-specific setting.

Here we are with yet another theme built around translucency, and more complaints about legibility and contrast — Miller writes “Apple says it heard from users throughout the iOS 26 beta testing period that they’d like a setting to manage the opaqueness of the Liquid Glass design”. Now, as has become traditional, there is another way to moderate the excesses of Apple’s new visual language. I am sure there are some who will claim this undermines the entire premise of Liquid Glass, and I do not know that they are entirely wrong. Some might call it greater personalization and customization, too. I think it feels unfocused. Apple keeps revisiting translucency and finding it needs to add more controls to compensate.

NSO Group Banned From Using or Supplying WhatsApp Exploits ⇥ courthousenews.com

Carly Nairn, Courthouse News Service:

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said in a 25-page ruling that there was evidence NSO Group’s flagship spyware could still infiltrate WhatApp users’ devices and granted Meta’s request for a permanent injunction.

However, Hamilton, a Bill Clinton appointee, also determined that any damages would need to follow a ratioed amount of compensation based on a legal framework designed to proportion damages. She ordered that the jury-based award of $167 million should be reduced to a little over $4 million.

Once again, I am mystified by Apple’s decision to drop its suit against NSO Group. What Meta won is protection from WhatsApp being used as an installation vector for NSO’s spyware; importantly, high-value WhatsApp users won a modicum of protection from NSO’s customers. And, as John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab points out, NSO has “an absolute TON of their business splashed all over the court records”. There are several depositions from which an enterprising journalist could develop a better understanding of this creepy spyware company.

Last week, NSO Group confirmed it had been acquired by U.S. investors. However, according to its spokesperson, its “headquarters and core operations remain in Israel [and] continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities”.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

NSO has long claimed that its spyware is designed to not target U.S. phone numbers, likely to avoid hurting its chances to enter the U.S. market. But the company was caught in 2021 targeting about a dozen U.S. government officials abroad.

Soon after, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American companies from trading with NSO by putting the spyware maker on the U.S. Entities List. Since then, NSO has tried to get off the U.S. government’s blocklist, as recently as May 2025, with the help of a lobbying firm tied to the Trump administration.

I have as many questions about what this change in ownership could mean for its U.S. relationship as I do about how it affects possible targets.

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The New MacBook Pro Is €35 Less Expensive in E.U. Countries, Ships Without a Charger ⇥ macrumors.com

Are you outraged? Have you not heard? Apple updated its entry-level MacBook Pro with a new M5 chip, and across Europe, it does not ship with an A.C. adapter in the box as standard any more. It still comes with a USB-C to MagSafe cable, and you can add an adapter at checkout, but those meddling E.U. regulators have forced Apple to do something stupid and customer-unfriendly again. Right?

William Gallagher, of AppleInsider, gets it wrong:

Don’t blame Apple this time — if you’re in the European Union or the UK, your new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro or iPad Pro may cost you $70 extra because Apple isn’t allowed to bundle a charger.

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it. Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter.

In Ireland, the MacBook Pro used to start at €1,949; it now starts at €1,849; in France, it was €1,899, and it is now €1,799. As mentioned, the adapter is €65, making these new Macs €35 less with a comparable configuration. The same is true in each Euro-currency country I checked: Germany, Italy, and Spain all received a €100 price cut if you do not want an A.C. adapter, and a €35 price cut if you do.

It is not just countries that use the Euro receiving cuts. In Norway, the new MacBook Pro starts at 2,000 krone less than the one it replaces, and a charger is 849 krone. In Hungary, it is 50,000 forint less, with a charger costing about 30,000 forint. There are some exceptions, too. In Switzerland, the new models are 50 francs less, but a charger is 59 francs. And in the U.K., there is no price adjustment, even though the charger is a configure-to-order option there, too.

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. (For the sake of brevity and because not all of these pages have been recently crawled by the Internet Archive, I have not included links to each comparison. I welcome checking my work, however, and would appreciate an email if I missed an interesting price change.)

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

Gallagher:

It doesn’t appear that Apple has cut prices of the MacBook Pro or iPad Pro to match, either. That can’t be proven, though, because at least with the UK, Apple generally does currency conversion just by swapping symbols.

It can be proven if you bother to put in thirty minutes’ work.

Joe Rossignol, of MacRumors, also gets it a little wrong:

According to the European Union law database, Apple could have let customers in Europe decide whether they wanted to have a charger included in the box or not, but the company has ultimately decided to not include one whatsoever: […]

A customer can, in fact, choose to add an A.C. adapter when they order their Mac.

OpenAI and Nvidia Are at the Centre of a Trillion-Dollar Circular Investment Economy ⇥ bloomberg.com

Tabby Kinder in New York and George Hammond, Financial Times:

OpenAI has signed about $1tn in deals this year for computing power to run its artificial intelligence models, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them.

Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh, Bloomberg:

For much of the AI boom, there have been whispers about Nvidia’s frenzied dealmaking. The chipmaker bolstered the market by pumping money into dozens of AI startups, many of which rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units to develop and run their models. OpenAI, to a lesser degree, also invested in startups, some of which built services on top of its AI models. But as tech firms have entered a more costly phase of AI development, the scale of the deals involving these two companies has grown substantially, making it harder to ignore.

The day after Nvidia and OpenAI announced their $100 billion investment agreement, OpenAI confirmed it had struck a separate $300 billion deal with Oracle to build out data centers in the US. Oracle, in turn, is spending billions on Nvidia chips for those facilities, sending money back to Nvidia, a company that is emerging as one of OpenAI’s most prominent backers.

I possess none of the skills most useful to understand what all of this means. I am not an economist; I did not have a secret life as an investment banker. As a layperson, however, it is not comforting to read from some People With Specialized Knowledge that this is similar to historically good circular investments, just at an unprecedented scale, while other People With Specialized Knowledge say this has been the force preventing the U.S. from entering a recession. These articles might be like one of those prescient papers from before the Great Recession. Not a great feeling.

The New ‘Foreign Influence’ Scare ⇥ 404media.co

Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Democratic U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, raising concerns about the $55 billion acquisition of the giant American video game company in part by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Specifically, the Senators worry that EA, which just released Battlefield 6 last week and also publishes The Sims, Madden, and EA Sports FC, “would cease exercising editorial and operational independence under the control of Saudi Arabia’s private majority ownership.”

“The proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influence and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government,” the Senators wrote in their letter. […]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the assumption was that it would be democratic nations successfully using the web for global influence. But I think the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during which Russian operatives worked to sway voters’ intentions, was a reality check. Fears of foreign influence were then used by U.S. lawmakers to justify banning TikTok, and to strongarm TikTok into allowing Oracle to oversee its U.S. operations. Now, it is Saudi Arabian investment in Electronic Arts raising concerns. Like TikTok, it is not the next election that is, per se, at risk, but the general thoughts and opinions of people in the United States.

U.S. politicians even passed a law intended to address “foreign influence” concerns. However, Saudi Arabia is not one of the four “covered nations” restricted by PAFACA.

Aside from xenophobia, I worry “foreign influence” is becoming a new standard excuse for digital barriers. We usually associate restrictive internet policies with oppressive and authoritarian regimes that do not trust their citizens to be able to think for themselves. This is not to say foreign influence is not a reasonable concern, nor that Saudi Arabia has no red flags, nor still that these worries are a purely U.S. phenomenon. Canadian officials are similarly worried about adversarial government actors covertly manipulating our policies and public opinion. But I think we need to do better if we want to support a vibrant World Wide Web. U.S. adversaries are allowed to have big, successful digital products, too.

More on Liquid Glass ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

So, no, I don’t want tools that “give way to content” or “shrink to bring focus to the content.” When I’m cooking, I want my knives, spatulas, measuring spoons, and the like exactly where they belong, so they’re instantly at hand. My Mac is set up in much the same way, with every app appearing exactly where I expect and, for the most part, providing an interface that looks and works as I want.

Engst pointedly differentiates “productivity apps — real tools” from apps permitting a more passive consumption of media. It may make more sense for controls to fade away in something like a media player. In most of the apps I use every day, however, I want to have obvious and immediate access to the tools I need.

Here is another cooking analogy: a minimum requirement, for me, for a stove is for it to be equipped with physical knobs. I do not want to be hunting for the magic capacitive spot or pressing a +/– toggle to change a burner’s setting. The latter options seem more elegant; they give the impression of refinement. But they are less effective for the same job because they do not allow for real-world practicality.

Engst also wrote a well-illustrated guide to the many accessibility settings and hidden preferences to configure Apple’s operating systems for different contrast and usability preferences. A notable issue with these settings is that some properties of Liquid Glass are not truly the fault of transparency. Instead, a Liquid Glass element — like Control Centre — might be reflecting the colours around it, giving the impression of translucency without actually being translucent. This effect does not appear in window-specific screenshots when you have “Reduce Transparency” turned on so, as Engst writes, it makes it better for creating screenshots for documentation. But it does mean that, while the “Reduce Transparency” setting is literally true, it feels dishonest.

Raluca Budiu, of Nielsen Norman Group, published a critical assessment of Liquid Glass with a number of agreeable points. The customized iMessage conversation is appropriately hideous. However, I found the argument against the more prominent Search button in many apps unconvincing:

Search in earlier versions of iOS lived at the top of the page. In Mail or Messages, users had to scroll down to reveal the bar. It wasn’t the most discoverable pattern, but years of repetition made it second nature.

Now, in iOS 26, search has migrated to the bottom of the screen and is always visible. For newcomers this might feel easier to find, but for long‑time users it’s a jarring break from habit that slows them down until the new pattern becomes ingrained. (Even if the new pattern might prove beneficial over time, existing users must relearn it, which in the short run means lost productivity and added frustration.)

It is not often I see NNG criticizing an improvement in making a control more obvious. While I suppose it is true that users will need to understand they can simply tap the search button instead of remembering to scroll for the hidden field, I cannot imagine this relearning is as arduous as the long-term impact of hiding the search function.

What is disappointing is that the hidden search field still exists in a handful of places. Most notably, Music on iOS 26 still has two different kinds of Search: the one you can get to by tapping on the button in the bottom-right, and the locally-scoped one you will find at the top of views like Playlists.

Meta Takes a Principled Stance Against Having Principles ⇥ wbez.org

In January, Mark Zuckerberg bade farewell to the ostensibly censorial administration of Joe Biden, welcoming in the nominally free speech offered by Donald Trump’s then-incoming presidency. The complaints about Biden aired by Zuckerberg on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast were weak, misleading, and silly, but they helped continue the narrative championed by many U.S. politicians who are now in a position to help Meta.

In a video announcing the changes to the company’s moderation policy, Zuckerberg lamented the “censorship” users have faced, and promised to collaborate with the government to fight those demands:

Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.

This explanation is mostly nonsense — and dishonest.

Nader Issa, WBEZ Chicago:

At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area has been taken down by the social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The group, called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland,” has been increasingly used over the last five weeks of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign, to warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores and other community staples so they can take steps to protect themselves.

If this group was actually used for “coordinated harm”, as Meta claims, surely it or the Department of Justice could give some specific examples. I could only find one archived copy of the page and I see nothing of the sort in what is admittedly a handful of posts. I also do not see anything looking remotely like “coordinated harm” in the posts cached by Google.

The point is not Meta’s hypocrisy on what it will remove compared to what it will defend, but what this hypocrisy achieves. Meta spent years using a socially conscious image to help marginalized people feel safer, albeit only after a long history of controversy over privacy violations, harassment, and gender-based abuse (PDF).

Now it is using a combination of regressive policies and assisting the government’s domestic quasi-military invasions to ingratiate itself with this administration. If Meta were trying to appeal to the public or advertisers, it would not be so subservient to this administration — people in the U.S. are more suspicious of government power than in recent memory, and disapprove of ICE. Meta is completely on-board with this administration’s demands. If there is a line these companies will not cross, we might find it if we reach it.

D’Angelo Dies Aged 51 ⇥ variety.com

Steven J. Horowitz and Jem Aswad, Variety:

D’Angelo, a legendary R&B singer who helped pioneer neo-soul, has died. He was 51.

You know how an artist page on Apple Music might have, above the row of their albums, a selection of “Essential Albums”? All three of D’Angelo’s records are deservedly listed as “Essential” on his page. D’Angelo made the kind of music that felt instantly timeless; classic and contemporary in equal measure. Everything he made felt distinctly him. This one hurts.

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Apple Has Discontinued the Clips App You Probably Forgot About ⇥ macrumors.com

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple has essentially discontinued Clips, its video-editing app designed to allow users to combine video clips, images, and photos with voice-based titles, music, filters, and graphics to create enhanced videos that can be shared on social media sites.

I do not know what Slivka means by “essentially”; Apple says it is gone, though it remains listed in the “Creativity” category on Apple’s first-party apps webpage. This is not surprising to me. Before it was pulled offline, it was most recently updated in May 2024.

I am truly curious about the likely lifespan of a few recent Apple apps. How much longer will Invites last? Sports seems like it could be around for longer, but I am a little worried about Classical, which still does not have a Mac app.

Canadian Liberals Introduce Second, Less-Controversial Border Bill, but Still Want to Pass the First One With Creepiness Intact ⇥ cbc.ca

Michael Geist:

he government today reversed course on its ill-advised anti-privacy measures in Bill C-2, introducing a new border bill with the lawful access provisions (Parts 14 and 15) removed. The move is welcome given the widespread opposition to provisions that would have created the power to demand warrantless access to information from any provider of a service in Canada and increased the surveillance on Canadian networks. The sheer breadth of this proposed system was truly unprecedented and appeared entirely inconsistent with Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. […]

While the removal of those sections is a positive sign, Geist’s celebration is not the full story.

Jim Bronskill, Canadian Press:

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the government would still pursue passage of the first bill, C-2, which proposes giving authorities new powers to search mail and access personal information.

The move means the federal border security proposals will proceed through Parliament on two separate legislative tracks, with Bill C-12 likely moving ahead first.

Bill C-2 would then make its way through Parliament, with elements included in the new C-12 deleted to avoid duplication.

Last legislative session, and for the past three years, the Liberals have been pitching a much-needed update to our privacy laws. Anandasangaree voted in favour of it. Yet he is also responsible for this privacy hostile legislation that, for some reason, this government is fighting for. And, though the Conservatives are presently objecting to the privacy violating clauses in C–2, Geist points out that “[s]uccessive governments — both Liberal and Conservative — have tried to bring in lawful access” of similar nature. We need to take privacy seriously, not with the cynicism of these two parties.

‘How Did Somebody Make This?’ ⇥ theoatmeal.com

Matthew Inman:

AI has accelerated our abilities like that drug from the movie Limitless. It’s writing our papers, analyzing our bloodwork, and planning our weddings. Now your average Keith has the critical thinking abilities of a supercomputer running at ten-trilion teraclops per floppyshart.

It enables ordinary minds to have extraordinary abilities.

Inman’s thoughts on A.I. tools for creativity are similar to my own. There are plenty of ways to use them to lighten the load on mundane and uncreative tasks. But whole-cloth generation in a fake social network is such a poor outcome.

I got the title of this post from near the top of the comic. It will stick with me. A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.

We all have ordinary minds that have been shaped by time and practice to be able to do different extraordinary things. Each of us cannot do most of the skill-dependent things most other people in the world can do. In the right hands, A.I. tools can help produce some fantastic art, but the art probably will not come from the collective digital mind of everything scraped from the internet. It comes from people who think creatively and apply technology to that.

‘Give Me a Single Reason Why Sora 2 Should Exist’ ⇥ youtube.com

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 much 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.

Apple Is Helping the U.S. Government Chill Speech on ICE ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai:

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.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

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?

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the E.U. ⇥ ccc.de

Thorin Klosowski, Techdirt:

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.

Elina Eickstädt, Chaos Computer Club:

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.

Fighting over Chat Control is becoming an annual tradition.

U.S. State Department Wants to Use Tech Companies as Leverage Over European Policy ⇥ techpolicy.press

Dean Jackson, Tech Policy Press:

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.