Call Screening Is the Best Reason to Update to iOS 26 ⇥ businessinsider.com

Apple:

Call Screening automatically answers calls from unknown numbers without interrupting you. Once the caller shares their name and reason for their call, your iPhone rings and shares their response so you can decide if you want to pick up. You can also choose to silence calls from unknown callers and send them directly to voicemail.

I understand being reluctant to update to iOS 26, but if you are as irritated by spam calls throughout your day as I am, this feature is a compelling reason to make the leap. I have had it switched on since the first iOS 26 beta releases and, while I still receive spam calls, virtually none of them have actually notified me.

If you frequently get calls from numbers you are not saving to your contacts, this is probably not a feature for you. It is also something you have to remember to turn off in instances where you might get calls from an unknown number. I have forgotten to do so before and then I need to rush to answer the phone. But I do not live the life of a publicist or celebrity lawyer, and the main reason I get phone calls to my personal number is because someone is trying to defraud me, and I would rather not speak to them.

Katie Notopoulos, of Business Insider, does not like this feature:

Sure, you say, most of those unknown calls are junk. Well, not exactly — there’s already a spam filter that’s separate from unknown callers. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but I find it’s pretty accurate in assessing “spam risk.” (Android users here will probably laugh, since they’ve had this feature for a long time.)

This feature — unknown call screening — is for non-spam unknown callers — a doctor’s office, your kid’s school, a friend with a new number, someone from work whose number you don’t have saved yet. Sure, some of these may be annoyances that you don’t actually want to deal with (I don’t want to “deal” with my dentist reminding me of my appointment, but that’s life). Still, having a phone number where people who need to reach you can reach you is the point of the phone.

The separate spam filtering feature appears to be carrier-specific; it is not an option available to me.

I am not someone who is opposed to phone calls in general; I do not usually mind answering them even when I am doing something else. However, one of the things Notopoulos’ article omits is how the reception of the cold phone call changed as cell phones became the norm. The fact that someone can call me anywhere does not mean I wish to be reached everywhere I happen to be carrying the device that is, among many other things, a phone.

Notopoulos is nostalgic for “having a clever outgoing answering machine message” and seems to be fine with voicemail, so the principle of deciding whether to answer the phone does not seem to be a problem. But having a middle layer that gives the recipient more information is, apparently, a step too far, for reasons I do not understand. Nothing about this prevents making or receiving phone calls. It just means I get to decide whether I want to interact with criminals.

Amazon, Google, Meta, and SpaceX Want to Be Africa’s Internet Providers ⇥ restofworld.org

Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of World:

In contrast to Europe and North America, where connectivity is well distributed, Africa still offers hundreds of millions of potential first-time users. Only about 38% of Africans were online in 2024, according to the International Telecommunication Union. This leaves more than 400 million people without internet access. Even where networks exist, usage remains constrained by high costs and poor service quality. Mobile broadband penetration in sub-Saharan Africa remains below 50%, while fixed broadband access is limited largely to major cities.

Control of infrastructure — not consumer apps — has become the strategic priority, Oniosun said.

It is extraordinary to think that companies like Google and Meta, already dominant in much of the software infrastructure used in African countries, are also angling to assert control over the physical realm, too. Worth noting Meta has repeatedly claimed it is developing novel infrastructure only to bail after the public relations sheen had faded.

Sponsor: StopTheMadness Pro — Take Back Your Web Browser ⇥ underpassapp.com

StopTheMadness Pro by indie developer Jeff Johnson is a web browser extension that stops website annoyances and privacy violations. A one-time universal purchase in the App Store, StopTheMadness Pro supports Safari on iOS, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox on macOS.

StopTheMadness Pro is not an ad blocker but rather a one of a kind web browser extension, with a huge number of unique features. Its main purpose is to force websites to behave as you expect and intend, by stopping them from sneakily subverting your web browser’s built-in functionality. For example, websites can block your copy and paste, block your contextual menu, block your keyboard shortcuts, play videos without your permission, hide the native video controls, and hijack your link clicks for tracking purposes. StopTheMadness Pro stops all that madness!

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Beloved for years by users, widely praised by the Apple news media, StopTheMadness Pro is the essential companion to your web browser.

How Do You Comparison Shop in the App Store? ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

As an App Store developer myself, I’ve stubbornly resisted the trend, perhaps to my financial detriment, though I’m currently doing ok with upfront paid apps. One thing that drives me nuts about the In-App Purchase business model is that it creates massive customer confusion. How do you know in advance exactly how much the app costs, what exactly you’re getting for the price, and what functionality, if any, is free? And if you’re confused about any of these things, then how can you possibly comparison shop between various apps in the App Store?

Johnson mentions several ways, but I have one more complaint: Apple utterly buries this information on individual app listings. To get even a vague idea of how much an app is going to cost, a user must scroll all the way past screenshots, the app’s description, ratings and reviews, the changelog, the privacy card, and the accessibility features — all the way down to a boring-looking table that contains the seller, the app’s size, the category, the compatibility, supported languages, the age rating, and only then is there a listing for “In-App Purchases”. And, if they exist, a user must still tap on the cell to find the list of options and their associated cost.

This is almost at the very bottom of the app’s listing. The only things on the page after the In-App Purchases section are the copyright string, links to the developer’s website and privacy policy, and then the recommendations section. Apple thinks the cost of an up-front purchase is so important it replaces the text in the “get” button with the price. But for freemium apps? The possible costs are tucked away in a place I bet many users never look.

(For full disclosure: Johnson’s StopTheMadness Pro is sponsoring Pixel Envy this week, but he has not asked me to post this, and I would have linked to it regardless.)

Alberta Separatists Are Desperate to Attract U.S. Interference, Money ⇥ ft.com

Ilya Gridneff and Myles McCormick, in a Financial Times article with the headline “Trump Officials Met Group Pushing Alberta Independence From Canada”:

Leaders of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a group of far-right separatists who want the western province to become independent, met US state department officials in Washington three times since April last year, according to people familiar with the talks.

A worrisome paragraph if I have ever read one. The separatists’ behaviour has understandably been interpreted as treasonous, and the possible interference of the U.S. is a question of national sovereignty.

But — and maybe I am being naïve — I think this article is less of a description of reality, and more like a marketing stunt by these traitors. Here are the next two paragraphs:

They are seeking another meeting next month with state and Treasury officials to ask for a $500bn credit facility to help bankroll the province if an independence referendum — yet to be called — is passed.

“The US is extremely enthusiastic about a free and independent Alberta,” Jeff Rath, APP legal counsel, who attended the meetings, told the FT.

And later in the article:

Rath declined to say who the APP spoke to in Washington. “We’re meeting very, very senior people leaving our meetings to go directly to the Oval Office,” he claimed.

I would like to believe the Times has better sourcing than trusting the word of a ding-dong like Rath, but I have my doubts. The Times has previously relied on self-aggrandizing leaks for news stories, and this sounds like more of the same. These meetings surely happened — which is scary enough — but Rath could have leaked this in order to pressure State Department officials ahead of another meeting next month.

This is very dangerous, of course. These jokers are inviting meddling and laundering it through the respectable and staid pages of the Financial Times. If these guys so badly want to live in the U.S., they are capable of moving there. But they should not drag the rest of us into their braindead plan, nor should the U.S. government encourage or support them.

The one thing giving me hope is that, according to Ipsos polling, 28% of Albertans would vote to separate, and only 56% of that segment are actually committed. This is nowhere near the kind of public support as, for example, Brexit. On the other hand, that committed group still represents one in six Albertans who want to ruin the lives of the rest of us because, again according to Ipsos, they feel we have been “historically mistreated within Canada”. These people are fools — but we often fail to take seriously the power of very foolish people.

Publishers Are Restricting Internet Archive, Access Attempting to Avoid A.I. Scraping ⇥ niemanlab.org

Andrew Deck and Hanaa’ Tameez, NiemanLab:

“A lot of these AI businesses are looking for readily available, structured databases of content,” he [the Guardian’s Robert Hahn] said. “The Internet Archive’s API would have been an obvious place to plug their own machines into and suck out the IP.” (He admits the Wayback Machine itself is “less risky,” since the data is not as well-structured.)

As news publishers try to safeguard their contents from AI companies, the Internet Archive is also getting caught in the crosshairs. The Financial Times, for example, blocks any bot that tries to scrape its paywalled content, including bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and the Internet Archive. The majority of FT stories are paywalled, according to director of global public policy and platform strategy Matt Rogerson. As a result, usually only unpaywalled FT stories appear in the Wayback Machine because those are meant to be available to the wider public anyway.

Hahn may find the Wayback Machine “less risky” than the official API, but that was the reason Reddit cited when it blocked the Internet Archive last year. I feared this likely outcome. Publishers’ understandable desire to control the use of their work is going to make the Internet Archive less useful because neither A.I. scrapers nor the Internet Archive matches the robots.txt rules at the original domain with their policies on archival websites.

Secrets of a Scam Compound ⇥ wired.com

Wired this week published an extraordinary story sourced from a forced scammer inside a compound in Laos. The premise of being lured into running romance scams is a well-known one; if you have heard about “pig butchering”, you are likely familiar with it. But the granularity of information shared by this source with Andy Greenberg is staggering: internal chats among leadership, video recordings inside the compound, and guides to teach these imprisoned people how to do crime.

In a companion article, Greenberg writes about the source:

Over the next days, with little in the way of orientation, he was pulled into the machinery of the scamming organization he’d come to know as the Boshang compound: He was trained to create fake profiles, given scam scripts, and then set to work on a nocturnal schedule, manually spamming out hundreds of introductory messages every night to lure new victims. At the end of his shifts, he would return to the top bunk of his six-man dorm room — little bigger than the hotel room he’d occupied those first nights — with a toilet in the corner.

Yet from the very beginning, he says, he was determined to again defy his circumstances. It struck him that he knew more about computers than most of his coworkers, or even his bosses, who seemed to understand only how to use social media, AI tools, and crypto currency. Within days, he began daydreaming of using his technical skills to quietly gather information on the compound and, somehow, expose it.

Brave.

Romance scams are not new. The reason this particular type of scam is so novel is because the technologies that enable it are brand new: cryptocurrencies, ChatGPT to spit out convincing scripts, generative image tools for producing “photographs”, and even deepfake software for video calls.

Aeronaut Is a Great Bluesky Client for MacOS ⇥ aeronautapp.com

You know how I have been banging on about the lack of a good Mac client for Bluesky? Like, for years? Well, I stopped complaining in October because I started using a terrific Bluesky app for MacOS.

Aeronaut is that app. It is native Mac software, not a wrapper around a Chromium instance, and it behaves like a proper Mac app, too. It feels, in the best possible way, like a throwback to the days of great indie software: clever name, beautifully designed, resource-light, and respectful. $3 per month or $20 per year.

‘Phantom Obligation’ ⇥ terrygodier.com

Terry Godier, in an article nominally about RSS readers, but applicable for any app that sends notifications of any kind:

An interface that shows you an unread count is making an argument: that reading is something to be counted, that progress is something to be measured, that your relationship to this content is one of obligation.

We should be more conscious of which arguments we’re immersing ourselves in, hour after hour, day after day.

This is the kind of essay that has gotten me to rethink my own habits. I am the kind of sicko who enables badges on most types of communication apps, and it is often unnecessary. I do not actually think of reading my feeds as a task list, so why do I enable features to create that implication? It is madness, and it is my own fault.

A Slot Machine for Feelings in Every Pocket ⇥ platformer.news

Casey Newton is not very impressed by the recently published study the effect of screen time on over 25,000 Manchester-area youth, the same one I linked to last week. Newton is especially dubious of the conclusions drawn by two of the researchers in an article for the Conversation:

Here the researchers extend their conclusions beyond what their data can support. On one hand, I believe them when they suggest that banning social media for under-16s will not instantly improve the median teen’s mental health. On the other, though, blanket bans do offer a simple solution to any number of ongoing problems on these platforms: the ease with which they connect predators to children; addictive mechanics like “streaks” and notifications that roil classrooms and wreck sleep; predictive algorithms that introduce young girls to disordered eating and related harms; and the unsettled feeling that comes from staring way too long at a feed you had only intended to look at for a minute.

Though Newton links to Mike Masnick’s coverage of two studies, Newton only dissects the one that is not behind a paywall. I get it; the other study is $45 USD, and I only read free Platformer articles. But it would behoove him to try to find both for a more comprehensive article. For example, the Australian researchers found usage of under two hours a day was not correlated with negative outcomes, but a good retort is that teens are spending an average of nearly five hours across seven social media apps per day. I would say get a friend in academia, or see if your local public library has access to JAMA Pediatrics, Newton.

Anyway, one thing you will notice about Newton’s list of harms is that only one of them is actually child-specific: assuming a blanket ban is entirely effective, predators would indeed find few-to-no children on these platforms.

The rest of the list contains problems without any age limit. I have plenty of friends in their thirties and forties — and older — who bemoan the time-sucking quality of social media apps, and the forced engagement mechanics they employ, though not in those words. We have decreasing control over our experience on these platforms. I can use whatever newsreader I want, but if I want see my friends’ Instagram pictures, I have to wade through a jumbled-up mess in my feed of posts from accounts I do not follow that could be several days old. I have little control over this because Meta thinks it knows what I want better than I do.

Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch — Newton links to this article approvingly — write of finding “mountains of evidence” in Meta’s research into the damaging effects of its own products. Over thirty studies which, they are careful to note, span a gamut of ages. Nevertheless, they conclude that “social media is not safe for children and adolescents”. If there are legitimate questions of product safety that also impact adults, perhaps a mere age check is insufficient. Newton says “there are no 13-year-olds in casinos because we know that the environment is designed to exploit them”, which is true enough, but if we are all carrying a little slot machine in our pocket, maybe that is a different problem.

Newton is right: age-gating is a “simple solution” compared to writing regulations that could limit these gambling-adjacent features and withstand inevitable legal challenges. But if the risks are as grave as portrayed by Newton, and Haidt and his collaborators, perhaps this is not an issue of carding every user.

NetNewsWire Updated With Liquid Glass Support ⇥ netnewswire.blog

Brent Simmons:

NetNewsWire 7.0 for Mac is now shipping!

The big change from 6.2.1 is that it adopts the Liquid Glass UI and it requires macOS 26.

(Note to people who aren’t on macOS 26: we fixed a lot of bugs in 6.2 and 6.2.1 knowing that many people might skip, or at least delay, installing macOS 26. Also note that there’s a page where you can get old versions of NetNewsWire.)

This is a rather tasteful implementation of Apple’s new visual design language, as is the still-in-beta iOS version, but if you are a hard no on Liquid Glass, I doubt it will change your mind.

The good news is that this particular genre of software is built on open standards: as Simmons writes, older versions of NetNewsWire. Or, if that is still not enough, other RSS readers like (previous site sponsor) Unread are available. You can even use different readers on different devices if you use a syncing service like Feedbin. Imagine that.

Apple ‘Honours’ Martin Luther King While Working Against His Legacy ⇥ jagsworkshop.com

Jason Anthony Guy:

Dr. King was a radical. Yes, he spoke of peace and nonviolence, and also advocated for dramatic social change and economic justice. Dr. King didn’t encourage passivity, he endorsed disruption. […]

Guy posted this on 20 January, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, and just days before Alex Pretti was murdered and Tim Cook attended a screening of ‘Melania’. I had been meaning to link to it since then, and last week’s events made it all the more pressing. Guy quotes King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, though I have chosen some additional context:

[…] First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action” […]

Cook is, at best, the kind of white moderate who would disappoint King: someone who, optimistically, agrees with the goals of those protesting the horrific turn this second administration has taken but disagrees with their methods. Cook’s legacy used to be carrying Apple in the post-Jobs era to new financial heights. Now it is gold trophies and authoritarian appeasement.

Tim Cook Attends Screening of Propaganda for Authoritarian’s Wife ⇥ rollingstone.com

Regular readers may have observed I have tried to be careful with how much I write about the rise of fascism in the United States. It is not because I do not notice or care — quite the opposite — but because I think the correct viewpoint for me is of an outside observer: what is most relevant about this administration from a Canadian perspective. And, also, because I assume many of you are already getting your fill of truly awful news. Some things are just so obviously bad that it seems almost perfunctory for me, of all people, to say anything. However.

Tessa Stuart, Rolling Stone:

On Saturday, the same day that an ICE agent shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti as he was restrained, face first on ground in Minneapolis, a few dozen VIPs — including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former heavy-weight champion Mike Tyson — gathered at the White House for a lavish party, complete with custom-made popcorn buckets and gift boxes emblazoned with the first lady’s portrait, to celebrate the forthcoming documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History.

Andy Jassy and Mike Hopkins, both of Amazon, were also in attendance, but that is partly explained by the company’s $40 million bid for the rights to film part of the brief period between the election and inauguration. $28 million of that went straight into Melania Trump’s bank account. Apparently, this is not a bribe or unduly coercive in any way. Imagine that.

Cook, though? He was there because he wanted to be. This was on the same day that, as Stuart writes, agents of the U.S. government murdered a second citizen in Minneapolis in three weeks, and then lied about it. Renée Good and Alex Pretti both embodied courage. Cook chose fealty and, ultimately, cowardice.

FTC Says It Will Appeal Ruling in Meta Monopolization Case ⇥ ftc.gov

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

Today, the Federal Trade Commission filed a notice that it will appeal the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s November 2025 ruling in favor of Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”) in the FTC’s monopolization case against Meta. The appeal will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

I wonder if Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the Chamber of Progress, will continue referring to it as “one of Lina Khan’s most prominent anti-big tech cases”, despite its origins in the first Trump administration and this appeal landing in the second one.

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Unsung ⇥ unsung.aresluna.org

Last month, Marcin Wichary began publishing updates to Unsung, a new blog about “software craft and quality”. Contra “backseat software”; among the posts published so far is a list of well-made apps and websites.

I disagree with some of the choices, but one thing you will notice is that there are very few examples from the world’s biggest vendors. Most are indie projects. That says a lot to me about the kinds of software with which people develop a connection.

Backseat Software ⇥ blog.mikeswanson.com

Mike Swanson:

And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.

I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.

You have heard about this stuff before, but Swanson’s piece is not mere repetition. There is history, and reasonable suggestions on how to correct the current oft-miserable state of software.

TikTok U.S. Prompts Users to Allow More Permissive Tracking, Advertising ⇥ wired.com

The TikTok deal announced in December is done. There is now a U.S.-specific version of the app running the same recommendations algorithm as the rest-of-the-world version but trained only on a bald eagle-approved data set. The U.S. app is owned by a bunch of friends of the family who bought it at a suspiciously low price. Oh, and users now have a more invasive privacy policy to contend with.

Reece Rogers, Wired:

Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. A spokesperson for TikTok USDS declined to comment.

Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer. However, it is a good reminder that lawmakers’ opposition to TikTok’s data collection was never based on a principled stance on user privacy.

This may be U.S.-only for now, but I am deeply concerned about the precedent it sets for the rest of the world. There is nothing I can see that limits the scope of the new U.S. app to only U.S.-based users. In the near term, I bet a few other countries could be pressured into switching to TikTok U.S.; farther into the future, what this looks like is an acknowledgement that the U.S. will take what it needs with whatever justification it wishes.

Update: Lily Jamali, BBC News:

Precise location sharing hasn’t yet been enabled in the US, where it is expected to be optional and turned off by default so users will be asked to opt in with a pop-up message. TikTok has not said when the update is due to reach American users.

TikTok already collects similar data from users in the UK and Europe as part of a new “Nearby Feed” feature that lets users find events and businesses near them.

Via Jason Anthony Guy.

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Two Major Studies Indicate the Social Media Panic Doesn’t Hold Up ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years now, we’ve been repeatedly pointing out that the “social media is destroying kids” narrative, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and others, has been built on a foundation of shaky, often contradictory research. We’ve noted that the actual data is far more nuanced than the moral panic suggests, and that policy responses built on that panic might end up causing more harm than they prevent.

Well, here come two massive new studies — one from Australia, one from the UK—that land like a sledgehammer on Haidt’s narrative — and, perhaps more importantly, on Australia’s much-celebrated social media ban for kids under 16.

The Australian study is sprawling, with over 100,000 youth participating over several years, though it should be noted it uses self-reported data only from weekdays and only for three hours after school. The study’s authors say that this “may not fully reflect total daily or habitual use”. (Also, they seem to have excluded nonbinary youth.) Still, the findings support a reasonable conclusion that children who spend a “moderate” amount of time using social media — about two hours daily or less — tend to have better outcomes, and it depends what they are doing.

The British study, on the other hand, found “distinguishing between active and passive use of social media played a limited role in our overall findings” suggesting “the distinction may be overly broad and does not sufficiently predict mental health”. So even the supposed quality of screen time might not have as much of an effect as we imagine.

The Australian government may have banned providing access to social media for people under sixteen, affecting millions, but these studies indicate it is an over-broad response to a complex topic. In explaining the limitations and caveats, the Australian researchers pointed out “[h]igher after-school social media use may also indicate fewer extracurricular or social opportunities” including those that may result from too much time spent on homework. That is not to say it would instead make more sense to me to ban homework, but it seems banning social media is both a red herring response to our built environment and has the potential to limit the actual socialization that takes place in these apps.

Canada is one of several countries working on a similar ban. Marie Woolf, Globe and Mail:

Prof. [Taylor Owen, of McGill University] warned that without a regulator, when a child hits the age when social media is allowed, they could “jump right into a social-media ecosystem that has no protections in it whatsoever.”

He said there is a need to address problems on platforms, which include certain kinds of content, “the incentives within them, the way the algorithms boost that content, the lack of guardrails, the lack of accountability, lack of safety teams and measures.” He added that a teen social-media ban would not resolve these problems on its own.

I am not knee-jerk opposed to considering the many harms created or exacerbated by online platforms; I think Owen is right in arguing for a more comprehensive vision. But if we are looking at correcting for failures in platform accountability, social media use by youth seems somewhat less important. The problem is that trying to make platforms in any way responsible for user-generated material will break the internet. It is much more straightforward — in theory — to add an age gate.

There is plenty of blame to go around, however, for our agency over our attachment to our devices, and I have no problem doling some out to platforms. “Time spent” is a bullshit metric that has nothing to do with user satisfaction, and encourages aggressive strategies like autoplaying the next video after one finishes and suggesting an endless scroll of entertainment. These features might not have an outsized effect on young people. But we should consider that the operators of these platforms are not building their apps with the happiness of people in mind. They are adding and continuously refining this functionality because it increases the time people spend using their thing instead of the competitor’s thing, thus making it more valuable.

Then again, perhaps we ought to limit social media use by age. Not for children, though: anyone over 55 gets read-only access to a maximum of six verified accounts, akin to broadcast television.

Court Rules TikTok Can Continue to Operate Offices in Canada ⇥ reuters.com

David Ljunggren, Reuters:

Canada’s federal court on Wednesday overturned a government order to close TikTok’s Canadian operations, allowing the short-video app to keep operating for now, and told Ottawa to review the case.

When the ban was enacted in November 2024, I noted the inconsistencies in the government’s position. The judge in this case, Russel Zinn, did not comment on why the ban was overturned, according to this Reuters story, and it looks like this decision will result in a new security review.

New Version of Siri May Run on Google Servers ⇥ macrumors.com

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors (I am linking to them instead of the actual source link because Bloomberg is expensive):

In yesterday’s report detailing Apple’s plans to turn Siri into a chatbot in iOS 27, [Mark] Gurman said that the company is in discussions with Google about hosting the forthcoming Siri chatbot on Google-owned servers powered by Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a class of custom chips designed specifically for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. The arrangement would mark a major departure from Apple’s emphasis on processing user requests either directly on-device or through its own tightly controlled Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.

Note that the press release last week regarding certain Apple Intelligence features set to be powered by Google’s Gemini specifically says “Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute”. Siri will have Apple Intelligence features but, in the company’s unique structure, it itself is not part of Apple Intelligence. Also note that Google in November announced Private A.I. Compute, which should be useful.

User Agency and Updates ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors, in December:

Apple generally tries not to leave behind users who haven’t updated or can’t update to the latest OS version. Apple also usually offers security updates for past OS versions, and indeed, the company also released iOS 18.7.3 to address the same issues.

Unfortunately, there’s an ugly catch: Numerous iPhone users have reported that if your iPhone is capable of running iOS 26 but you’re still back on iOS 18, you won’t be offered iOS 18.7.3. Instead, the only update option you’ll be given is iOS 26.2.

As Snell writes, Apple created versions of iOS 18.7.3 for newer iPhones, but withheld those builds from public release, following a pattern of pushing users to the newest version of iOS after about the x.2 release.

It is a good reminder that the iOS adoption rate is not solely motivated by individuals, or even primarily so. Apple requires people to install the newest major version, even if they have automatic updates turned off, if they wish to install patches for security vulnerabilities. With automatic updates switched on, even stragglers will eventually find themselves using the new version anyway as long as their device is compatible. My wife’s iPhone was updated overnight to iOS 26 this week. She is not a Liquid Glass fan.

Two Small iOS 26 Usage Share Updates ⇥ fosstodon.org

On Friday, I received an email from Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, confirming iOS 26 users had been incorrectly counted as iOS 18.x in its analytics software and, accordingly, in its public trends. Cullen said the company was working on a patch. According to a note pinned today to the top of its iOS version chart, corrected reporting only began rolling out yesterday. However, because this chart represents a version share breakdown for a month that is mostly behind us, more accurate figures will start becoming noticeable in February. (Figures are available from one full day showing a 49% combined share for iOS 26.1 and 26.2.)

That is the first update. The second is by way of Timo Tijhof, principal engineer at Wikimedia, who points me to Wikimedia’s network-wide stats showing, as of 11 January, around 50% of “Mobile Safari” visitors were using iOS 26, compared to 41% using iOS 18. (Also, 2.8% using “Mobile Safari 19”, and I suppose that can be added to the ’26 total.) Not bad — until you start poking around the figures from the same time in prior years. In the week of 12 January 2025, for example, nearly 72% of visitors were using some version of iOS 18, then the most recent. The week of 14 January 2024, over 65% were using iOS 17. iOS 26 adoption is fifteen to twenty points behind the uptake rate seen before. Not good.

I am irritated at myself for not thinking of using Wikimedia’s figures, which represent users across all versions of Wikipedia, Wikiquote, the Commons media library, and plenty of other widely used websites. I have relied on them plenty of times before for similar projects since they represent such a gigantic and general-purpose sample. Thank you to Tijhof.

Fine, have a third bonus update: I have been trying to get Chris Taylor at Mashable to correct his assertion — attributed to me — that the frozen version number in the user agent string of Safari in iOS 26 is a “bug”. It is a claim that appears in the dek (“a bug Apple won’t squash”), and a few times in the text (“there’s actually a bug in the reporting system, and it’s Apple’s fault”; “a tiny bug in Safari”). I told Taylor about the error, and he updated the article way down in the fifth paragraph, of seven total, to claim “it isn’t a bug, exactly”, which is a long and misleading way of saying it is not a bug at all. Taylor writes “for obscure techie reasons, as far as Apple is concerned, it’s a feature”, but does not elaborate or explain, which is kind of Taylor’s job as a “veteran tech … journalist”. I guess I am a little peeved to be cited for Taylor’s own error.

A Lament for Aperture, the App We’ll Never Get Over Losing ⇥ ikennd.ac

Daniel Kennett:

If you’re not familiar with Aperture, it’s an app for organising, managing, editing, and exporting images. If you’re familiar with Apple’s Photos app, it’s that. But for professionals! Aperture is a complex app — its PDF user manual is over 900 pages long — so to keep this manageable I’ll focus on one particular aspect of it via two short excerpts from said manual.

Two excerpts that hide an astonishing amount of engineering effort.

If you had asked me from 2007 why I saved a huge amount of money to buy a MacBook Pro, one explanation I would have given you would have been about Aperture. When I bought another Mac in 2012, I would have again cited Aperture as a motivating factor. It was a far better reason to keep buying stuff from Apple than the kind of mandated stickiness of a paid iCloud account.

The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously. Times change, though, and it seems like Apple has lost the soul of what made Aperture excellent. It should really figure out what that is. Questionable user interfaces, mediocre icon design, tolerance for lagginess and bugs — these are all bad things, but they are symptoms of a greater loss.

‘Your Search Button Powers My Smart Home’ ⇥ tomcasavant.com

Tom Casavant:

You see, what I hadn’t considered that night when I was messing around with this website’s chat bot was that the existence of a public user facing chat bot had the requisite of having public LLM API endpoints. Normally, you probably wouldn’t care about having a /search endpoint exposed on your website, because very few (if any) people would care to abuse it. Worst case scenario is someone has an easier way of finding content on your site…which is what you wanted when you built that search button anyways. But, when your /search endpoint is actually just talking to an LLM and that LLM can be prompt injected to do what I want it to do, suddenly I want access to /search because I get free access to something I’d normally pay for.

If you have administrative access over a website and you have had reason to dig into the access logs, you have no doubt seen an avalanche of automated requests looking for common security vulnerabilities. Now imagine that but with a bunch of plain language attacks on the very expensive new website feature you added. It is going to be a wild several years as more people begin to integrate these sophisticated yet — to anthropomorphize — gullible text boxes without understanding how much it is going to cost them directly and indirectly.

A Canadian’s Call to Arms ⇥ aaron.vegh.ca

Aaron Vegh:

Most governments in Canada and around the world rely on Microsoft’s software. Most businesses route their applications through AWS. Most people tap away their lives on devices built and sold by American businesses, running American operating systems.

It’s like waking up and finding yourself ensnared. And it makes me mad as hell!

I get it.

This is, of course, a massively difficult problem. I love the MacBook Pro I am using right now, and it would be unbelievably difficult to get me to switch to some crappy product just to fight with driver incompatibilities again. A big problem is that trying to build a competitor to these established, widely supported, and well-integrated companies is a daunting task no matter where it takes place. The most valuable companies in the world rely on each other. The fact that we are in a situation where we must consider the consequences of our dependence on a handful of corporations showing a dictator-like level of obsequiousness to the U.S. president is also a big problem.

This can be a long-term goal. In the nearer term, we — the rest of the world — should take reasonable regulatory steps to curtail the influence and control of U.S. companies where we are. Any understanding that there was a great responsibility aligned with the great power of the U.S. has vanished, at least for now.

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‘Every Data Centre Is a U.S. Military Base’ ⇥ policyalternatives.ca

Paris Marx, writing for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:

It can be easy to believe that all this pressure [on governments by the United States] is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a longstanding process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.

A common complaint, mostly from U.S. politicians and think tanks, about competition policies designed to address the influence and control of massive technology companies is that they are anti-American. This is a tacit acknowledgement that the current state of affairs advantages U.S. companies, and an expectation that the rest of the world should be completely fine with that.

Google Gemini to Provide Foundation for Some Apple Intelligence Features ⇥ ft.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.

The multiyear partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.

Apple and Google, in the statement that still has not been corrected to change Al to AI, but I presume it is about artificial intelligence rather than Google’s Albert technology:

After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.

Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, and George Hammond, Financial Times:

The deal would be structured in the form of a cloud computing contract, which could lead to Apple paying several billion dollars to Google over time, a person familiar with the agreement told the FT.

[…]

“I think that the ChatGPT integration is going to die on the vine … having two large models, given the economies of scale, wouldn’t make a ton of sense for Apple,” said Gene Munster at Deepwater Asset Management, who estimated the Gemini contract could be worth $5bn for Google.

Or, to put it another way, Gemini is worth to Apple roughly what a few months of default search placement in Safari are to Google, assuming these figures are in the right ballpark.

This announcement is vague. It seems to imply the Siri features that were supposed to roll out last year have been rebuilt on a new architecture that, turns out, has Gemini at its foundation. Apparently some other features are coming in mere months, like an ability to “tell more stories”, which will be a welcome distraction while Siri fails to text the right person in my contacts. Max Weinbach, of the well-connected Creative Strategies analysis team, is optimistic for what this means. I think it is super weird that Apple has teased Gemini integration alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT since WWDC 2024, but it is unclear whether this deal will include that capability.

The Exact Same Things Were Said About Smart Glasses Ten Years Ago

Jeremy Freed, of GQ, in an article with the provocative headline “You Won’t Be Able to Escape Smart Glasses in 2026”:

“If AI glasses are going to go mainstream, 2026 will be the year that we start to see that,” says Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE. Meta introduced its first line of Ray-Ban AI Glasses in 2021, and has sold more than 2 million pairs since launching the second generation in 2023. By the end of 2026, the company plans to sell 3 million more while ramping up production to 10 million pairs annually. As hard as it is to imagine 10 million people — the combined populations of NYC and Philly — buying Meta AI Glasses every year, it may well come to pass. “The iPhone came out in 2007 and by 2011 BlackBerry was still the number-one smartphone,” says Bovell. “The iPhone wasn’t seen as a phone, it was seen as a toy. The exact same things that were said about it in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses.” Likewise, no one knew they needed an Apple Watch when the product launched in 2015, but the company has reportedly sold hundreds of millions of them since then.

This article was published a day after people from, presumably, Meta or EssilorLuxottica told Bloomberg they were going to double production to 20 million units by the end of this year in response to overwhelming demand. So from two million since 2023, three million this year alone, to twenty million next year — that is quite the forecasted sales curve. It is almost enough to make you think Meta has a hardware hit on its hands.

Bovell is from Canada, where the BlackBerry was indeed still the top smartphone brand through 2010, but that was not a worldwide trend. By 2011, Android phones were outselling BlackBerries in the United States; worldwide, RIM was never the best-selling smartphone vendor.

As for Bovell’s claim that the “exact same things that were said about it [the iPhone] in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses”, the problem is that there is a far better comparison given we have already had an example of smart glasses in Google Glass, and the same things were being said about those a decade ago. In 2012, CBC News quoted a researcher saying Glass is “the mainstreaming of this kind of device”. In 2013, Jessica Guynn, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that they “may still be on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. But they are not going to stay there very long”. The following year, Paul Saffo lamented for CNN that while “[i]nfo-glasses today are like PCs in 1984 – they look cool but perform a few functions that aren’t all that useful, such as taking pictures or surfing the Web while sitting in a bar with friends” — yes, “they look cool” is presented as a factual statement — in the very near future from 2014 “we are certain to be astonished by the capabilities of the device sitting on the bridge of our nose”.

Well, it has been nearly twelve years since Saffo wrote that, and the killer capabilities of smart glasses remain based entirely around the camera. And you know what? It is a pretty good feature — but it alone is not as compelling today as was a smartphone in 2008. I do not think the question is are smart glasses today akin to smartphones in 2008?; the question is more like what is different about today’s smart glasses compared to Google Glass?. To his credit, Freed attempts to answer this in noting that Meta’s Wayfarer shape instead of a sci-fi is an obvious upgrade, but I think he underplays the advancements in image, language, and speech detection since Google Glass by calling it “a Siri-like voice assistant”. GQ is not a technology publication, true, but that is among the biggest changes for a device so dependent on real-time interaction with the surrounding environment, like for translation features.

But there are problems with today’s smart glasses that remain unchanged from those that affected Google Glass. Most obviously, they are still a privacy nightmare for yourself and for others. Meta says the externally-visible recording LED must not be obstructed to record video, but people are modifying the glasses to remove that restriction. They must effectively be treated like spy glasses because they could be recording anywhere — in a public area running facial recognition software, to the apparent privacy of a massage room.

Meta is far from the only company producing glasses like these. Snap has its Spectacles and Xiaomi’s A.I. Glasses are available in China. All of these companies are responsible for developing a selfish future that prioritizes selling buyers on the advantages of an unobtrusive camera while barely acknowledging the societal impact of the same. Google is taking another kick at the can, and rumours consistently indicate Apple and Samsung are each working on their own, too. They may all say the right things about privacy, but the fundamental fact is that a barely-visible camera is a tool for abuse as much as it is entertainment.

Freed:

Whether the possibilities presented by smart glasses sound fun and appealing or like the tipping point into a dystopian nightmare is a matter of perspective. There are the obvious doubts about what happens if someone hacks your glasses and what companies like Meta are planning to do with your data (spoiler alert: it’s being used to train AI), but these aren’t so different from existing concerns around other internet-enabled devices. “Every piece of technology ever created has been used for good and bad things,” says Edward R. McNicholas, a Partner at Ropes & Gray in Washington DC who leads the firm’s global data, privacy and cybersecurity practice. “Just think of the Internet itself — it helps bad actors, but it brings the globe together, creates enormous economic opportunity, and inspires millions.” What will ultimately decide the fate of smart glasses, he says, is regulatory friction — and cultural embrace. “That is, what’s the rizz? Do the 20-somethings deem it based or cringe?”

McNicholas was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1996. His career as a lawyer is at least Millennial-aged and, as a Millennial myself, I feel pretty confident in saying he cannot use “rizz”, “based”, or “cringe” like this. It is not, in fact, lit.

I find it difficult to believe it is a coincidence there are two stories promoting Meta’s A.I. glasses appearing in the news the same week Meta laid off ten percent of its Reality Labs employees, and reallocating funds to the team developing those glasses. I am sure these things have their defenders, and may be more popular than Meta expected given the company’s long run of hardware flops. The relative success of the glasses means Meta can jettison its original messy concept of the metaverse and redefine it to suit its needs today.

But this does not feel like the nascent days of the iPhone, nor like we will not “be able to escape smart glasses” this year. I knew lots of people with smartphones in the mid-to-late-2000s, including some with original iPhones despite them not being available in Canada. Anecdotally, I do not personally know anyone who owns or is even thinking about buying smart glasses. Mind you, I know plenty of people with an Apple Watch today who did not consider it compelling even years after it launched. Maybe it is like the early days of smartwatch ownership, after all, and I simply do not notice because Meta’s glasses just look like Ray-Bans. That is, I guess, the whole point.

Despite the concept of smart glasses being the product of so much hype and excitement, it never seems to have materialized in something you can buy. Maybe that will change; maybe that has changed without me noticing it. But one of the other biggest shifts of the past ten years is how much people say they want more distance from technology. One of the predictions for 2026 in a list from the New York Times is the rise of the “dumb phone” as a status symbol. Some people who have tried smartwatches have found them more demanding over time than helpful; I stopped wearing one after four years because I need less technology in my life, not more. There is a vast gulf between what people say they want and their actual behaviour, of course, but I cannot shake the feeling this technology is still too much of an imposition. We will not need to “escape smart glasses” if people still choose not to buy them.

Adequate Red Teaming of A.I. Models Requires Better Policy ⇥ nytimes.com

Riana Pfefferkorn, in an op-ed for the New York Times:

A.I. companies like xAI can and should do more not just to respond quickly and decisively when their models behave badly, but also to prevent them from generating such material in the first place. This means rigorously testing the models to learn how and why they can be manipulated into generating illegal sexual content — then closing those loopholes. But current laws don’t adequately protect good-intentioned testers from prosecution or correctly distinguish them from malicious users, which frightens companies from taking this kind of action.

To the extent A.I. companies are truly “red teaming” their models — this term has been misused by the industry, which often outsources the work to contractors in developing nations — current laws restrict the limits to which they can be taken. On this I agree with Pfefferkorn, and I think she is right to call for a change in policy.

But I am not convinced xAI is much interested in ensuring its model is that much safer. CSAM is obviously over the line and I would be surprised if anyone there were to defend Grok on that. Most anything else, however, is something I think xAI would find permissible albeit perhaps unseemly for Grok to generate. Remember: Grok is supposed to be “unfiltered”. Does it offend you? Because it should, buddy. That is the freedom you get when you look at the world through the lens of a mall-grade edgelord who will be turning 55 years old in June.

Updating the Record on iOS 26 Usage Share

I made a mistake on Friday: instead of waiting to polish a more comprehensive article, I effectively live-blogged my shifting understanding of how StatCounter was collecting its iOS version number data by way of updates and edits to existing posts. In my own defence, I did not know the rate of users updating to iOS 26 would become as much of a story unto itself as it has. So allow me to straighten this out.

Here is the background: StatCounter publishes market share data by country and user technology based on statistics it collects from its web analytics package which, it says, is used by over a million websites totalling around five billion page views monthly. I have not heard of many of the sites using its analytics, but it seems to be a large enough and generic enough sample that it should be indicative — more so than, say, visitors to my audience-specific website. Ed Hardy, over at Cult of Mac, used StatCounter’s figures to report, on January 8, that “only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed”. Hardy compared this to historical StatCounter figures showing a 63% adoption rate of iOS 18 by the same time last year, 54% on iOS 17 the year prior, and 62% on iOS 16 the year before that. If true, this would represent a catastrophic reluctance for iPhone users to update.

If true.

I do not think the iOS 26 uptake rate is about 15%. I think it is lower than the 54–63% range in previous years, but not by nearly that much. I think StatCounter has been misinterpreting iOS 26’s user base since last year because of a change Apple made to Safari.

If the phrase “user agent” does not make you respond by tipping your head to the side like my dog did when I asked him if he knew what I meant by that, you can skip this paragraph. A user agent string is a way for software to identify itself when it makes an HTTP request on behalf of a user. A user agent might describe the type and version of a web browser, the operating system, and have other information so that, in the old days, websites could check for compatibility. This leads to user agent strings that look a little silly:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.

This does not represent a Firefox user, despite starting with “Mozilla”, nor does it represent a Safari or Chrome user, despite the mentions of “Safari”, “Chrome”, and “AppleWebKit”. It is a user agent string for Microsoft Edge, which is begging to be treated like its competitors.

This is a simplified explanation, but it is important for how StatCounter works. When someone browses a website containing its analytics code, it reads the user agent string, and that is how StatCounter determines market share. The above user would be counted for Edge market share (“Edg/134.0.0”) and Windows. Which version of Windows? Well, while “NT 10.0” suggests it is Windows 10, it is also used by Edge running on Windows 11 — that part of the user string has been frozen. The Chromium team did the same thing and reduced the amount of specific information in the user agent string. This removes a method of fingerprinting and is generally fine.

This movement was spearheaded by Apple in 2017, when Ricky Mondello announced Safari Technology Preview 46 “freezes Safari’s user agent string. It will not change in the future”. But this remained a desktop-only change until September 2025, when Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, announced that the version of Safari shipping in iOS 26 would have its user agent stuck on the previous version of iOS:

Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Apple justified this change only by implication, writing “we highly recommend using feature detection instead of UA string detection when writing conditional code”. But, as Jeff Johnson points out, this change does not eliminate version detection entirely:

[…] because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent. On macOS, in contrast, the latest version of Safari typically supports the three latest major OS versions, so Safari 26 can be installed on macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 14 Sonoma in addition to macOS 26 Tahoe, and therefore the User-Agent — which actually says “OS X 10_15_7”! — is a little more effective at obscuring the OS version.

I noticed this, too, and it led to a mistake I made in my first guess at understanding why StatCounter was reporting some iOS 26 traffic, but not a lot. I thought StatCounter could have made a change to its analytics package to interpret this part of the user agent string instead, but that it may not have rolled out to all of its users. I was wrong.

What actually appears to account for iOS 26’s seemingly pitiful adoption rate is that third-party browsers like Chrome and Brave produce a user agent string that looks like this, on my iPhone running iOS 26.3:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_3_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/144.0.7559.53 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Safari, meanwhile, produces this user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_7 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

“iPhone OS 26_3_0” on Chrome, but “iPhone OS 18_7” in Safari. And iOS 18.7 also exists, with a similar user agent string as Safari, albeit with “Version/18.7” in place of “Version/26.3”. The operating system version is the same in both, however: “18_7”. StatCounter’s iOS 26 data is not reflective of all iOS users — just those using third-party browsers that still have the current iOS version in their user agent string.

Even though third-party browsers are available on iOS, most users browse the web through Safari. And that means StatCounter is almost certainly counting the vast majority of people on iOS 26 as iOS 18.7 users. I retrieved those user agent strings using StatCounter’s detection utility, which is how it says you can validate the accuracy of its statistics. And it seems they are not. (I asked StatCounter to confirm this but have not heard back. Update: StatCounter’s CEO told me iOS 26 users had been miscounted.)

The actual rate of iOS 26 adoption is difficult to know right now. Web traffic to generalist websites, like the type collected by StatCounter, seems to me like it would be a good proxy had its measurement capabilities kept up with changes to iOS. Other sources, like TelemetryDeck, indicate a far higher market share — 55% as I am writing this — but its own stats reported nearly 78% adoption of iOS 18 at this time last year, also greater than StatCounter’s 63%, but not by as much. TelemetryDeck’s numbers are based on aggregate data from its in-app analytics product, so they should be more accurate, but that also depends on which apps integrate TelemetryDeck and who uses them. What we can see, though, is the difference between last year and this year at the same time, around 23 percentage points. For comparison, in January 2024, TelemetryDeck reported around 74% had updated to iOS 17 — iOS 26 is 19 points less.

If its reporting for this year is similarly representative, it likely indicates a 20-point slide in iOS 26 adoption. Not nearly as terrible as the misleading StatCounter dashboard suggests, but still a huge and embarrassing difference compared to prior years. Apple will likely update its own figures in the coming weeks for a further point of comparison. However, even though there are early indications iOS 26 is not as well-received as its predecessors, what we do not know is why that is. Fear not, however, for there are obvious conclusions to be drawn.

Hardy, later in the same Cult of Mac article:

It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.

David Price, of Macworld, made the same assumption based on Hardy’s story — twice:

It’s debatable whether the egregious design of last year’s OS updates falls under the category of arrogance or incompetence; perhaps it’s both. But the takeaway for Apple should be that customer loyalty is finite, and there are consequences when you consistently lower your quality-control standards. When your entire business is built on people liking you, it’s best not to take them for granted.

I have no particular affinity for Liquid Glass. I am not sure its goals are well-conceived, and I do not think it achieves those objectives.

Even so, I think the aversion to Liquid Glass is so strong among some commentators that erroneous stats are fine so long as they are confirmation of their biases. Put it this way: if just 15% of users had, indeed, upgraded to iOS 26 and the reason for so many people remaining on previous versions is Liquid Glass, surely that should mean a corrected percentage — perhaps 55%, perhaps lower — is indicative that most people are not actually bothered by Liquid Glass, right?

Yes, there is a likely 20-point gap and, if that is due to Liquid Glass, it should be cause for worry at the highest levels of Apple. iOS is a mass-market operating system. The audience is not necessarily obsessed with information density or an adequate contrast ratio. If a redesign of iOS were exciting, people would have raced to update, just as they did when iOS 7 was launched. They instead appear hesitant. Maybe the reason is Liquid Glass, or maybe something else. Or maybe there are further measurement errors.

Whatever the case, I would avoid believing articles making sweeping conclusions based on a single data point. After all, if that number is shown to be incorrect, it destabilizes the whole argument.

Wishing for a More Flexible Apple Display Strategy ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s relationship with computer displays lately. Maybe it was the report that the iMac Pro might somehow return, combined with John Voorhees of MacStories detailing how he gave up the Studio Display for an ASUS monitor? And, of course, there’s the prospect that we may be seeing new Apple-made standalone displays in 2026.

I don’t want to go back to a world where Apple no longer makes standalone displays. But that said, I think the company’s approach to display technology needs a serious upgrade.

Co-signed. When I bought my iMac 5K in early 2019,1 it was the only big desktop display Apple sold. Now, as I think about an update, I am dismayed I will not officially be able to use it as an external display, though it seems like Luna Display might be worth a shot over Thunderbolt 3. If that does not work, it is gutting to me that I will have to effectively re-purchase this same 5K panel for my desk. And then there is the question of what I should do with my otherwise-good-just-outdated iMac.

I have been keeping an eye on Michael Tsai’s posts about displays, particularly those regarding non-Apple 27-inch 5K models. I know I have to adjust my expectations. Even so, these all look pretty tacky. Imagine being from Asus or ViewSonic and thinking I want to look at an ugly logo all day long. Still, a near-thousand-dollar difference is hard to dismiss, especially since Apple’s expensive display continues to have software problems.

And, of course, the only other display Apple sells is a 32-inch model that is over-engineered for most people, costs nearly eight thousand dollars in Canada with a stand, and has not been updated in over six years. Asus’ comparable 6K display is under $2,000, though it is not as bright and it looks pretty tragic.

  1. Arguably the worst time in modern Apple history to be shopping for a new Mac. Butterfly keyboards in all the laptops, stale desktops, and on the verge of the last batch of Intel-based Macs. ↥︎

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

Less than five years ago, I sat through the interminable Epic v. Apple antitrust trial. Real heads will remember that Apple’s lawyers heavily implied that a naked bananaman called Mr. Peely was somehow inappropriate for court. This came after a week where Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”

You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and *especially *“just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.

Correctly righteous anger. That there has barely been any reckoning with this from Apple, Google, or even xAI despite at least a week of mainstream media coverage shows a callous indifference to the ongoing effects of the victims of this abuse. The best argument I can imagine — and it is a terrible argument — is that Apple’s lawyers advised the company against doing anything that looks anticompetitive since it is currently being sued by xAI. This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement — but, still, Apple and Google should not be carrying apps from this company for as long as it continues to be a mass-scale abuse generator.

Third-Party Browsers Report Different iOS Version Numbers Than Safari ⇥ macrumors.com

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26. In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.

The numbers being reported — 15% from StatCounter, 26% from MacRumors, and 55% from TelemetryDeck — are all over the place, but there is a clear-ish direction: people are not updating to iOS 26 like they have previous versions of iOS. There are lots of possible reasons why. Liquid Glass is the most visible explanation, but it is also possible the growing size of iOS plays a role. Apple Intelligence alone consumes nearly 7 GB of disk space on my iPhone.

Even so, the differences in these numbers are wild, especially compared to previous years where there was tighter agreement between different reports. For example, in January last year, TelemetryDeck reported about 78% were running iOS 18, StatCounter said it was 63%, and Apple itself said it was 68% of all iPhone users interacting with the App Store,1 rising to 76% adoption among users of devices four years old or newer. That is a fifteen point spread between. This year, with only third-party data so far available, it is a forty point spread between StatCounter’s 15% and TelemetryDeck’s 55%. Something is not adding up.

Update: My iPhone running iOS 26.3 is detected by StatCounter’s user agent detection tool as an iOS 18.7 device. This reflects how StatCounter says is how it collects its figures. Two other devices running iOS 26 were also detected by StatCounter as iOS 18.7 devices; however, on one of them in the Chrome browser, StatCounter correctly detected it as iOS 26.1. I also see this effect in my own limited analytics, where the only reports of iOS 26 versions are non-Safari browsers. If an analytics package relies on the OS version string in the user agent, it will also misreport iOS 26 Safari users.

Update: I wrote a whole article about this fiasco because the numbers Cult of Mac reported from StatCounter are very wrong.

  1. I corrected the description of iPhone users here thanks to a comment on Michael Tsai’s site. I am not sure what Apple means by “as measured by devices that transacted on the App Store”, though — does that include device users making in-app purchases, or recurring billing, or even automatic app updates? Or is it strictly devices purchasing or downloading apps from the App Store? ↥︎

Possible Inaccuracies in StatCounter’s Safari-Based Version Number Reporting ⇥ webkit.org

Yesterday, I linked to a report from Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac, pointing to a shockingly low iOS 26 adoption rate compared to previous years. Hardy relied on date from StatCounter, which uses web traffic at massive scale to measure all kinds of stuff, including operating system versions.

Given that StatCounter’s data has been similar to Apple’s own reporting of version adoption in previous years, I wrote:

[…] StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Well, it turns out there is likely a measurement difference that would not have impacted iOS 18 or before.

Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, in September:

Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

In both, you will notice iPhone OS is set to “18_6” despite only one of them actually running iOS 18.6. If StatCounter was relying on this part of the user agent string for calculating operating system version number, it could be inaccurate. There is still a Safari version number that could be a proxy for the operating system version in the latter part of the user agent string, however. On my iPhone, running iOS 26.3, the relevant section reads Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari. The iPhone OS string also reads “18_7”, which is also true for users running iOS 26.2.

It is not like StatCounter has no data for iOS 26. It shows traffic from iOS 26.1 and 26.2, indicating it likely updated its tracking metrics. It is possible some of the 18.6 and 18.7 traffic is also iOS 26 — we just do not know how much.

Data from TelemetryDeck seems more robust, and suggests about 55% of iOS users have updated to iOS 26, compared to about 78% of users one year ago running iOS 18. Not as bad as StatCounter’s figures, but still a twenty-point gap between latest version uptake last year and this year.

Thanks to Sam Gross for pointing me in this direction.

The Telegram Group Jailbreaking Grok ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, has been following a Telegram group in which members find workarounds to guardrails in generative A.I. products. Instead of finding interesting exploits to do clever things, though, the loopholes are being harnessed mostly to harass, abuse, and bully women. It is pretty revolting.

Maiberg:

It’s good and correct for people to be shocked and upset when they wake up one morning and see that their X feed is flooded with AI-generated images of minors in bikinis, but what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators. Some companies do a better job of preventing this abuse than others, but judging by the exploits I see on Telegram, when it comes to Grok, this problem will get a lot worse before it gets better.

It is clear Maiberg is just as disgusted with this as any person should be, so I am not trying to um, actually this, but I am not sure treating it as a “cost of doing business” is correct. The design and capabilities of these products matters immensely and, by permitting a relatively open-ended environment, xAI allows for experimentation to find its weak points. This is true of any generative A.I. product with a text box as its input. (As opposed to, say, a generative object removal tool in an image editor.) The degree of impact may also vary depending on the quality or style of the image — though, personally, I would still be alarmed if someone were harassing me with images even if they were cartoons.

Matt Burgess and Maddy Varner, Wired:

Unlike on X, where Grok’s output is public by default, images and videos created on the Grok app or website using its Imagine model are not shared openly. If a user has shared an Imagine URL, though, it may be visible to anyone. A cache of around 1,200 Imagine links, plus a WIRED review of those either indexed by Google or shared on a deepfake porn forum, shows disturbing sexual videos that are vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X.

Caroline Haskins, Wired:

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the stand-alone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment. Grok is operated by Musk’s multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence startup xAI, which also did not respond to questions from WIRED. In a public statement published on January 3, X said that it takes action against illegal content on its platform, including CSAM. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” the company warned.

X’s threat of “consequences” would be more convincing if it had functional site moderation generally.

Apps have been kicked off the App Store for far less than what X is today. Removing it — and the rest of xAI’s apps — would be a good start, but we should not expect private companies to do the job of law enforcement and regulators. There is a good case for banning X as long as it continues to permit this poorly-moderated image generator. People should be criminally charged, too.

iOS 26 Adoption Reportedly Lagging iOS 18 in Same Timeframe, According to StatCounter ⇥ cultofmac.com

Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac:

Nevertheless, iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

As far as I can tell, Apple updates its own iOS version stats twice annually — once with summer numbers, and again in the winter. Last year, it updated its stats on January 24, and it indicated 68% of iPhone users who transacted with the App Store on January 21 were using iOS 18. This is pretty close to StatCounter’s 63%. In February 2024, 66% were using the then-newest iOS 17; as Hardy writes, StatCounter reported it was around 54% at the time. A greater gap, to be sure, but it was clear well over half of iPhone users had updated. StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Update: Turns out there might actually be large measurement differences that did not impact previous years’ reporting.

Update: Relying on StatCounter’s data could be flawed because Safari and third-party browsers report different iOS version numbers due to a change in iOS 26.

Update: I wrote a whole article about this fiasco because the numbers Cult of Mac reported from StatCounter are, indeed, wrong.

Duolingo Displayed Ads in Live Activities, Dynamic Island ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines.

According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option.

I saw this, too.

Clover points to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which once advised “avoid using a Live Activity to display ads or promotions”, but now explicitly say “don’t use a Live Activity” to show ads. But the HIG is not the App Store Guidelines, and there is nothing in there expressly prohibiting this behaviour, as far as I can see. Tacky.

CSAM Generator xAI, Run by Elon Musk, Raises $20 Billion ⇥ nytimes.com

Kate Conger, New York Times:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Tuesday that it had raised $20 billion from investors to fund its expansion in the race to train the most intelligent chatbot.

[…]

Investors in xAI’s latest funding included Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority and Valor Equity Partners, a firm led by Mr. Musk’s friend and former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias. Nvidia, the maker of A.I. chips, also participated. In total, xAI has raised more than $42 billion, according to PitchBook.

Twenty billion dollars is a ghastly sum of money to give anyone, let alone someone who, in his official capacity, cut funding and killed over half a million people. This feels less like an investment for direct financial gain, and more like a way for a select group of people to find influence through a company connected to a transparently corrupt government.

If you are wondering about the timing — immediately after a wave of coverage about xAI’s Grok generating a flurry of abusive and heinous imagery — it turns out this is not the first time Grok’s output has not affected major investment news. In July, shortly after Grok began parroting praise of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. government’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced xAI would be one of several A.I. companies receiving up to $200 million. As of today, Grok’s stream of replies on X are still full of it generating sexualized images of real women, mostly without their consent. People with lots of money seem to think all of this is completely fine.

Grok Is Being Used to Depict Horrific Violence Against Real Women ⇥ futurism.com

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has included underage girls, on a platform that has notoriously gutted its content moderation team and gotten rid of nearly all rules.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World:

On January 2, India’s IT ministry issued a 72-hour ultimatum to X over its artificial intelligence chatbot generating “obscene” content — specifically, sexualized or manipulated images of women and, in some cases, minors.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

In addition to the sexual imagery of underage girls, the women depicted in Grok-generated nonconsensual porn range from some who appear to be private citizens to a slew of celebrities, from famous actresses to the First Lady of the United States. And somehow, that was only the tip of the iceberg.

When we dug through this content, we noticed another stomach-churning variation of the trend: Grok, at the request of users, altering images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed.

It is extraordinary yet, sadly, predictable to me that xAI is not treating this as a problem. Setting aside the fundamentally offensive capability that any user can tell Grok to generate photorealistic images based on someone else’s likeness — something it should be prohibited from doing — there appears to be no rush to fix this high-res misogyny on demand. A basic corporate response would be to turn off image generation capabilities until better safeguards are in place. Yet I just opened the Grok account on X, switched to the Replies tab, and it took almost no scrolling at all to find it generating images like these mere seconds ago.

The kinds of images Grok is generating should be criminal, and the people who oversee it should be held liable as should those who are prompting Grok. In my eyes, though I am not a lawyer, it is no less a case of harassment when a robot is directed by a user than when the user does it themself. I know A.I. is a nascent industry and there are things people are worried about over-regulating, but this should not be one of them. xAI is clearly overseen by adolescent-brained people who think it is sufficient to make it against company policy for users to make heinous requests, rather than sufficiently restricting its own software.

A Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an A.I. Scam ⇥ hardresetmedia.com

Elissa Welle, the Verge:

A viral Reddit confessional about a “major food delivery app” posted January 2nd is most likely AI-generated. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it’s become increasingly clear that the post’s text is probably AI-generated.

The link from “viral Reddit confessional” is not to the thread itself, but to a link post from the Verge. That post, from Andrew J. Hawkins, still asks “[w]hich company do you think this is about?” and has not been updated to reflect the fictional status of this story.

Alex Schultz, Hard Reset:

But the allegations in the Reddit thread are not true. They are fabricated. The original post was generated by AI and was intended to defame Uber Eats. I know as much because I traded Signal messages with Trowaway_whistleblow, who additionally used AI to prepare a fake-but-sophisticated-looking “internal document” of other supposedly damning allegations; Trowaway_whistleblow circulated the document to journalists, hoping someone would take the bait and publish a libelous “scoop.”

I was shocked to see so many people posting a link to this thread credulously. I write that not to scold anyone, only out of genuine surprise that an evidence-free anonymous Reddit post with clear inconsistencies was being spread so widely. There is so much existing evidence that so-called “gig economy” workers are exploited, underpaid, and endangered, and that food delivery platforms specifically are bad for restaurants, that we simply do not need to add questionable Reddit posts to the mix. This scam played into that reputation perfectly. If anything, that is why it makes sense to be even more skeptical. Being too credulous undermines the documented failures of these platforms through the confusion it creates.

MacOS Tahoe Menu Icons Are Inconsistent, Confusing, and Illegible ⇥ tonsky.me

You may remember Jim Nielsen’s exploration last month — previously linked — of the various icons in MacOS Tahoe menus, and comparing them to Apple’s long-time recommendations for icon use.

Nikita Prokopov went even further:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.

Update: Speaking of illegible, I think Prokopov should reconsider both the automatically-enabled snow animation and the searing yellow background.

Google Adds Generative Features to T.V. Sets, For Some Reason ⇥ blog.google

Shalini GovilPai, Google:

At CES 2026, we’re previewing how Gemini is making Google TV even more helpful, and bringing more ways to interact with your TV across more brands and surfaces like projectors. Here’s what we announced:

[…]

  • Use Nano Banana and Veo to reimagine your personal photos or create original media directly on your TV.

I guess I am the dumb one because I cannot see any reason why I would want Google to generate new scenes from my photos — let alone “original media”, whatever that means. This seems like something that would be fun for about ten minutes, once, and then would never be touched again.

What Is Happening in A.I. Advertising?

I am not sure which was the first of Google’s A.I. ads I saw that made me wonder if I was suffering from a fever. Maybe it was the one where “pandas in high fashion outfits walk the runway” — shown over thirty million times since early November, as of writing — but it just as easily could have been the one with “some crazy fruit creatures”. Maybe it was the ad with the strutting dogs. All are equally bizarre in the way a giant corporation’s ad company thinks it is offering something quirky and weird.

In any case, each ends with the same encouragement: “make more videos with a Google A.I. Pro subscription” for $27 per month. And I have to ask: who is this for?

These are not the only ads Google is running for its A.I. features. It shows them off in context for general users in Pixel phone ads, for students in ads for NotebookLM, for corporate clients with Cloud A.I., and — of course — for advertisers.

It also is not the only ad for its A.I. Pro subscription bundle. In a different one, different tasks are strung together for someone to do absolutely no work to put together a ’90s trivia night, leading to an invitation that twice tells recipients to wear platform shoes and “get ready”. The fine print might remind viewers to “check responses for accuracy”, but in the ad, the creator clicks send on a terribly written invitation immediately.

But it is those bizarre animal-themed ones which led to me looking up the advertising strategies of all the big A.I. players. I think this is a fascinating window. The ads they pay to show give us a glimpse of how they idealize the use of these products and services. While ads can sometimes be abstracted from the true function of a product or service, A.I. is already a new and confusing thing, so the narrative each company spins about its narrative seems telling of its own vision. I limited my search on this to ads of a typical video spot — no more than 30 seconds long. I did not include case studies or company-produced tutorials.

OpenAI runs a couple of types of ads. Those for ChatGPT mostly show its use as a personal assistant. There are several 30-second spots shot as oners with a pleasingly retro warmth. One has a training regiment for learning to do pull-ups; another is about siblings on a road trip. The same kind of messaging is used in a series of shorter spots. It also runs ads for its Codex agent, obviously targeted at developers, that are more clinical.

All of these seem practical to me. I could not find any current ads from OpenAI as disconnected from reality as Google’s. Just as notable is the focus of OpenAI’s spots — Google’s Ads Transparency Centre says the company is running about two hundred ads in Canada right now, most of which are variations in size, targeting, and placement of the shorter practical examples above, plus ads for Codex. For comparison, Google’s ads are all over the place. It is running around twenty thousand ads right now in Canada and, though not all of them are for A.I. features, many are, and you can tell from the examples above how much Google is just throwing stuff at the wall.

Anthropic’s ads are far more limited. All are for Claude and feature a video ad with no indication of how it is being used. It simply says “Claude is A.I. for […] all of us, anywhere” with overhead shots of different scenes representing different professions. This is basically the same sentiment as OpenAI’s ads, but executed without any specificity or examples. The company’s YouTube channel has plenty of case studies and demos, but no similar video spots.

If Anthropic is trying to mimic OpenAI’s quiet confidence, Perplexity has chosen overt aggression. Quasi-influencer types follow a similar script saying ChatGPT makes things up, and that is why you should trust Perplexity as it “searches the entire internet in less than one second and gives you one verified answer”. This explanation avoids acknowledging how much Perplexity depends on external A.I. models, including OpenAI’s GPT. In two of the ads, the narrator asks health-related questions, which is the boldest and maybe most reckless use case I have seen in any A.I. ad. There is nothing wrong with the answers it has generated, so far as I can tell, but it seems like a higher-stakes use than, like, a cake recipe, for example. In a variation of this ad type, the “influencer” looks generated, and contains Google search result screenshots that are at least twelve years old. Whatever the case, Perplexity must be spending huge amounts on its advertising. Each of these has been shown tens of millions of times, and two have hundreds of millions of views.

Meta’s ads are bizarre. I could not find any video ads for A.I. stuff — or metaverse-related things — through Google’s Ads Transparency Centre, but the company has a handful of 30-second spots on its YouTube channel. Almost like Google, Meta does not seem to know why people would use its A.I. assistant, so it comes up with offbeat premises that fall flat. In one, described as a way to “help sharpen your skills and transform the way you learn and understand complex subjects”, a guy is meeting his partner’s dad, a thermodynamicist. What a real person who is good at conversations would do is ask the dad a bunch of questions. What Meta thinks you should do is ask its assistant those questions instead and develop a fake level of expertise.

Also, not for nothing, but when I asked the same question in the web version of Meta A.I., it responded not with the tight and efficient explanation in the ad, but with:

😂 Thermodynamics-ist? Sounds like a real party crusher, eh? 🤣 Okay, serious face… A thermodynamicist is like, someone who’s all about the study of heat, energy, and how they transform into each other. They’re like the ultimate energy nerds, but in a good way! 🤓 They work with stuff like engines, refrigeration, and even black holes (mind blown, right? 🤯). Basically, they help us understand how to harness and use energy efficiently. Pretty cool, eh?

Am I meant to be charmed by “okay, serious face…” and four emoji in this barely coherent response? Because I am not.

In another ad, a guy somehow turns a large pan of what appears to be milk and two other pans of mystery liquid into pancakes for his kid. The kid pushes the plate off the counter, the dad asks “how can I get my two-year-old to eat his breakfast?”, and Meta A.I. knows that the kid likes when he makes silly faces. It is unclear to me how it knows this — whether it is automatically personalized to this user, or something the dad needed to teach the system, or if it is just an assumption that all two-year-olds like silly faces. The impression I get, though, is that it is distinctly unbelievable, and I do not want to give Meta knowledge of my entire life to find out if I am right.

To round this out, I looked for similar ads from Microsoft and Apple. I scrolled through hundreds of Microsoft ads on Google’s Ads Transparency tool, virtually all of which were Xbox related. I also checked its YouTube channel. I did not see any ads of the same type as above. I also found only a couple of ads for Apple Intelligence on Apple’s YouTube channel, both of which are for Clean Up in Photos. Apple seems to have cleaned up its YouTube channel overall, removing a whole bunch of older ads including some for Apple Intelligence.

I do not want to overstate how much these ads tell us — they are ads, you know? — but I think I learned something from the way each of these businesses thinks of its own products. In OpenAI, I see confidence; in Anthropic and Perplexity, I see an attempt to catch up. And in Google and Meta, I see established companies that are desperate to prove themselves — particularly in Google’s case, as I still cannot understand why generating arbitrary video is supposed to be compelling to a broad audience.

In the most practical and grounded ads, what I do not see are significant leaps beyond what a search engine today could do. OpenAI’s ads show ChatGPT summarizing a workout plan, but there are loads of those on external websites. Guides to road tripping through the Blue Ridge Parkway are plentiful. The same is true of the responses in Perplexity’s ads. What I see most in these ads are the big “pure” A.I. players normalizing their raison d’être, and established mega corporations entirely out of touch with what someone might want to do. Both are embarrassing in their own way for what is often pitched as the most revolutionary technology since the internet.

CakeGPT

2025 was a tough year for pretty much everyone I know, and I imagine the coming year will bring more of the same dreary news. I thought I would start off 2026 with something much dumber. I have plumbed the depths and found the bottom of the deepest of barrels, and that is how you are reading an “I asked ChatGPT” post.

There is a minor point here. I needed to use up a cup of milk and a quarter-cup of sour cream lurking in my fridge, and I wanted to make some kind of quick bread or loaf with it. The problem is that I am an inexperienced baker and I do not have a great sense of the proportion of other ingredients I would need.

I think this is the kind of thing a more advanced search engine could help with. I have previously used recipe finder tools like Supercook and RecipeRadar but, while they often ask what ingredients are available, they usually do not do so in specific quantities, necessitating looking through a bunch of recipes to find one that fits. Something that can process longer natural language queries seems tailor made for this kind of task.

I told it “I would like loaf/quick bread recipes that will use up 1 cup of milk and ¼ cup of sour cream”, and ChatGPT gave me four options. The first, a “classic vanilla quick bread”, looked adequate, but boring. (Also, a careful reader will quibble with its “optional add-ins (1–1½ cups total)” after which is a list of, among other things, cinnamon, and I do not think you should add a whole cup of cinnamon to anything.) I do like cinnamon, though, and I settled on the fourth suggestion, a “cinnamon swirl coffee bread”. Here is the entirety of its recipe:

Batter

2 cups flour
¾ cup sugar
1½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 cup milk
¼ cup sour cream
⅓ cup oil
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

Swirl

⅓ cup brown sugar
1½ tsp cinnamon

Bake

Layer batter + swirl in pan, gently knife once

350°F for 50–60 min

The ingredient list, to my untrained eye, seems fine. The instructions are obviously incoherent. More comprehensive directions were offered for the “classic vanilla quick bread” above it, which I missed because I only followed this recipe. Since I made a different loaf recently, however, I had a rough idea of what I should do. Also, I made a couple of minor changes:

  • I substituted vanilla extract for a few dashes of Fee Brothers’ cardamom bitters.

  • I had no ground cinnamon on hand and grating a cinnamon stick is tedious, so I stopped after about a teaspoon.

While these ingredient substitutions might affect the flavour, they would not materially affect the chemistry.

A cross-section of a golden loaf with a brown sugar swirl in the middle.

The resulting loaf is fine. I was hoping for either catastrophic failure or incredible success to more wholly justify this low-effort post, but it was just fine. Better than I expected, given where it came from, though the brown sugar swirl is achingly sweet and settled in the middle despite my best attempts. I still do not know what “gently knife once” is supposed to mean. I would not confuse this with a professional baker’s work, of course, but that is more like operator error. I wish the directions were, overall, clearer; if I had little to no previous experience baking a quick bread, I might have been lost.

I have experimented with ChatGPT and food before, particularly for weekly meal planning, and I have never been satisfied with its results. This, though, worked pretty well for me. I got to use up a couple of things in my fridge and made an okay dessert from it. Happy New Year.

Hidden Dangers of Age Verification ⇥ eff.org

Rindala Alajaji, the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Age-verification mandates create barriers along lines of race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. While these requirements threaten everyone’s privacy and free-speech rights, they fall heaviest on communities already facing systemic obstacles.

This is a compelling list of reasons why age verification laws are bad for all of us. I have mixed feelings about their need and implementation so far. In theory, I think checking user ages can be justified in a number of circumstances. Many apps and websites have some boilerplate text claiming they have no interest in serving children, and rely on kids self-authorizing. This is obviously insufficient. Also, Apple wants your iPhone to replace your wallet, but is somehow uninterested in using the information you provide, which is bizarre.

But giving tech companies even more information and control seems similarly fraught. Existing operating system-level options for parents are frequently broken, so why would we entrust them with some form of valid identification? And the current patchwork of laws and proposals could mean a worst-of-both-worlds situation: depending on where the company is governed, you might have to provide documentation to centralized app distributors, and to individual websites and apps. And, as Alajaji writes, the people who will struggle most to satisfy these requirements are already discriminated against.

I have written posts in which I am swayed by proposals for age verification. I am also convinced by the ten arguments Alajaji lists, many of which feel U.S. specific but are probably even more burdensome in developing countries. These problems seem to be varying degrees of insurmountable. But the great freedom created by the web has not yet been met with commensurate responsibility, either.

Liquid Glass Whiteout Conditions ⇥ eclecticlight.co

Howard Oakley:

In real life, whiteouts are dangerous because they’re so disorienting. There’s no horizon, no features in the landscape, and no clues to navigation. We see and work best in visual environments that are rich in colour and tonal contrasts. Tahoe has continued a trend for Light Mode to be bleached-out white, and Dark Mode to be a moonless night. Seeing where controls, views and contents start and end is difficult, and leaves them suspended in the whiteout.

Oakley reviews several lingering problems with Liquid Glass in MacOS, but the above remains the most — and I use this word intentionally — glaring issue I have with it. It is a problem that becomes entirely clear as you scroll to the bottom of Oakley’s post and find a screenshot from — I think — Mac OS X Mavericks with evident precision and contrast. I do not think Apple should have frozen this interface in time, nor that there are no changes made since which have been an improvement. However, though the exact same elements remain in today’s MacOS, they lack a similarly rigorous structure and care. It is notable how many translucency controls have been added in the intervening years.

Blacksky Algorithms Announces One-Click PDS Deployment Coming Soon ⇥ blackskyweb.xyz

Rudy Fraser, founder and CEO of Blacksky, made two big announcements on the occasion of it being the first anniversary of its launch. The first is online cash payments in USD, which I am a little unclear about, but relies in part on the trust implicit in AT Protocol connections.

The second, though, is easier for me to understand:

As Mozilla has been saying, we need to decentralize the internet. Decentralization necessarily requires running your own servers and as mentioned above by Moxie, founder of the beloved Signal protocol, no one wants to run their own servers, and never will. If you take seriously that both are true, how do you square the two?

[…]

I’m excited to say: promises made, promises kept. Clinton has built a mobile-friendly web app that will allow users to create a new PDS [Personal Data Server] that is truly one-click and will be hosted on Blacksky’s infrastructure. […]

I am intrigued by the possibility of announcements like this one. It offers a meaningful layer of self-governance beyond monolithic social platforms, made possible only by open standards like AT Protocol and the rival ActivityPub.

Meta Effectively Cancels Horizon O.S. Third-Party Headsets ⇥ roadtovr.com

Meta, in an April 2024 press release:

Today we’re taking the next step toward our vision for a more open computing platform for the metaverse. We’re opening up the operating system powering our Meta Quest devices to third-party hardware makers, giving more choice to consumers and a larger ecosystem for developers to build for. We’re working with leading global technology companies to bring this new ecosystem to life and making it even easier for developers to build apps and reach their audiences on the platform.

Ben Thompson reacting:

Motivations, of course, aren’t enough: unlike AI models, where Meta wants a competitive model, but will achieve its strategic goals as long as a closed model doesn’t win, the company does actually need to win in the metaverse by controlling the most devices (assuming, of course, that the metaverse actually becomes a thing).

The first thing to note is that pursuing an Apple-like fully-integrated model would actually be bad for Meta’s larger goals, which, as a horizontal services company, is reaching the maximum number of people possible; there is a reason that the iPhone, by far the most dominant integrated product ever, still only has about 30% marketshare worldwide. Indeed, I would pushback on Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Apple “won” mobile: they certainly did as far as revenue and profits go, but the nature of their winning is not the sort of winning that Meta should aspire to; from a horizontal services company perspective, Android “won” because it has the most marketshare.

Ben Lang, Road to VR:

Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”

But as we’ve now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program.

I link to Thompson’s article not to dunk on it, but to ask the natural followup question: if an Android-like operating system licensing model is a good indication of the potential for Meta’s metaverse vision, what does its effective cancellation suggest? This and the deep personnel cuts forecast what has seemed obvious from the start: the company’s vision of the metaverse is simply not compelling.

You will notice I am leaving open a door for somebody or some company to make a truly interesting metaverse-like thing. I am skeptical it will exist, but I can see the potential. Wherever it emerges, though, I would bet against Meta itself making this stuff viable. It does not do interesting and cool new things.

‘Fetch’ Is Not Happening on Android ⇥ app.sensortower.com

Here is something strange: while Meta’s Threads placed second on Apple’s most popular apps of 2025 list, it appears to matter far less to Android users.

I could not find a similar list to Apple’s as provided by Google, but Sensor Tower scrapes those charts regularly. In the last ninety days — all I can see without paying — Threads has danced around the top ten free apps on the U.S. App Store, as one might expect for one of the most popular apps of the year. On Android, however, it never cracks the top ten. This is not solely a U.S. phenomenon; Threads seems to be less popular in Canada, but its App Store ranking is dramatically better than its Play Store ranking.

Also, it is not like Android has a radically different list of popular apps. Right now, like on iOS, ChatGPT is at the top of the U.S. Play Store chart, two different versions of TikTok take third and fourth place — second place is Fortnite — and the top ten also includes Instagram and WhatsApp. The main differences between iOS and are the lack of Google apps on the Play Store ranking, presumably because they are preinstalled. This chart is only a snapshot of today’s rankings, but even over the last ninety days, TikTok and Instagram show durable popularity, while Threads struggles.

I previously compared Threads’ ranking in Mexico and Taiwan. So, for completeness’ sake, Threads has been pretty popular in the Mexican App Store, but is not even in the top fifty on Android. In Taiwan, Threads has spanned the top twenty free apps on iOS but, at a glance, it is easily putting in the best Android performance here.

What is going on here? Perhaps Apple and Google use different measurements to calculate their app ranking charts, so any comparison between the two is flawed from the jump. Neither company publishes its methodology for calculating those rankings. Maybe Threads is a worse app on Android than it is on iOS.

But the seeming disparity in popularity between the two platforms is a curiosity. I would assume social apps should, all else being equal, attract similar audiences across both platforms. That is true for apps like TikTok and Instagram. It is not true for Threads, which seems to attract a greater share of iOS users than Android. Strange.

I Guess ‘Fetch’ Is Happening ⇥ theverge.com

Alex Heath, the Verge:

By all measures, Meta’s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple’s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.

It is interesting to see how much this varies by region. In Canada, Threads was third, behind ChatGPT and Temu, as it was in Taiwan where Threads made something of an impact last year. In Mexico, it was twelfth. Top app charts for 2025 are not available for every country, but even this limited range is kind of curious. ChatGPT is huge everywhere, and you can feel it; TikTok continues to be a cultural force.

Yet, even though Threads is apparently incredibly popular, I still do not know anyone in real life who actually uses it. I have never once heard the phrase hey, did you see that post on Threads? from a friend. To be fair, it is not as though the charts are packed with the social apps I like: neither Bluesky nor any Mastodon client is on any of those regional charts. But a couple of years into Threads, my local news broadcasters and municipal authorities are not pushing me to follow their accounts there, either. Perhaps as this style of social media splinters into multiple competing networks, its draw on the public conscience may fade.

Heath:

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. “We do a bunch of work to get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,” Hayes explained.

I think I know what Hayes means by this. I use the web version of Instagram because I cannot stand the app. Until earlier this year, there was a persistent red dot on my notifications icon and, when I clicked on it, told me that there was a notification on Threads. However, when I clicked the notification, I saw no such updates on Threads. I fell for this growth hacking trick a few times before I realized it was just a lie.

Heath:

Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that it’s not a top priority for the current roadmap. “It’s something that we’re supporting, it’s something that we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing that we’re talking about that’s gonna help the app break out,” he said.

Two years ago, Tom Coates attended a large meeting held by Meta to discuss Threads’ enthusiasm for the fediverse. With that in the rear-view mirror, it seems Meta has gotten all it needs from integrating with an open protocol.

Google Sues SerpApi ⇥ seroundtable.com

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

On Friday, Google announced it had filed a lawsuit (PDF) against SerpApi for scraping the Google search results. Google alleges that SerpApi is running an “unlawful” operation that bypasses Google’s security measures to scrape search results at an astonishing scale.

[…]

Google claims SerpApi uses hundreds of millions of fake search requests to mimic human behavior. This allows them to bypass CAPTCHAs and other automated defenses that Google uses to prevent bots from overwhelming its systems.

In October, as part of its lawsuit against Perplexity, Reddit sued SerpApi and a couple of other scraper companies. Figuring out the difference between the ostensibly bad kind scraping practices of SerpApi and the good ones of Google seems like it will require a narrow definition, one Google is happy to provide.

Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel:

Google follows industry-standard crawling protocols, and honors websites’ directives over crawling of their content. Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing names — circumventing our security measures to take websites’ content wholesale. This unlawful activity has increased dramatically over the past year.

This explanation is not wrong, per se, though it is quite self-serving. The way many people begin their search for a product, service, or local business is with Google. A typical website owner is therefore desperate for a Google link, to the extent that they will reconstruct their site on a regular basis to suit its shifting ranking criteria. That means Google has broad power to do basically whatever it wants to the web. If publishers wanted to rank highly in search results, they were required to adopt the company’s proprietary fork of HTML. It can inject links, scrape third-parties, and build a self-preferencing silo — and website owners have to be okay with it or lose valuable referral traffic from Google users.

All of that is nominally ethical in Google’s view. What is not, apparently, is a company using workarounds to get a window into Google’s practices. I sympathize with that argument. The only tool we have is robots.txt and, regardless of SerpApi’s intent, I do not think circumvention efforts should be tolerated, though that should be paired with aggressive antitrust action to prevent incumbent powers from abusing their position.

Recent actions taken by U.S. courts, for example, have found Google illegally maintained its search monopoly. In issuing proposed remedies earlier this year, the judge noted the rapidly shifting world of search thanks to the growth of generative artificial intelligence products. “OpenAI” is mentioned (PDF) thirty times as an example of a potential disruptor. However, the judge does not mention OpenAI’s live search data is at least partially powered by SerpApi.

TikTok’s Future in Canada Looks Red, White, and Blue ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

Ritika Dubey, Canadian Press:

A cybersecurity expert says Canadian TikTok users likely won’t notice any changes to the social media app as major American investors sign a deal to form a new TikTok joint venture.

“This deal happens to be based on U.S. law only and it’s really not that impactful for Canadians on a day-to-day basis,” said Robert Falzon, head of engineering at cybersecurity firm Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

Canadians will continue to use the international version of the app that’s owned and influenced by Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd., he said.

There is a kind of implied for now which should be tacked onto the end of its impact on Canadians. This U.S.-specific version lays the groundwork for a political wedge issue in Canada and elsewhere: should people use the version of the app run by a company headquartered in Beijing and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors, or should they use the app run by a company based in the U.S and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors? Or, to frame it in more politically expedient terms, should people be allowed to use the “Chinese” app or should they be pushed into the “American” app? Under that framing, I would not be surprised to see the U.S. version become the dominant client for TikTok worldwide.

Our government under the previous prime minister forcibly closed domestic TikTok operations on national security grounds, though it did not ban the app. Perhaps that would have been too much, too soon. Now, though, politicians do not need to endure voters’ wrath if they banned a popular social platform, since there is another version with less scaremongering attached to it.

TikTok’s Lawless Days to End in January as U.S. Business Will Be Spun Off ⇥ cnbc.com

Jonathan Vanian and Julia Boorstin, CNBC:

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.

[…]

The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX, with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and almost 20% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.

Oracle is among the companies illegally supporting TikTok for the past year, along with Apple and Google. Instead of facing stiff legal penalties, Oracle will get to own a 15% piece of TikTok. It probably helps that co-founder Larry Ellison is a friend and donor to Donald Trump.

MGX will also get a 15% share. It is a state-run investment fund in the United Arab Emirates, even though I thought the whole point of this deal was a collective panic over foreign government interference. It probably helps that MGX used Trump’s family cryptocurrency to invest in Binance.

The deal is structured so these firms — and Silver Lake — actually have control. But, after all this, it seems like the single biggest shareholder in this new entity will be Bytedance, with 19.9%.

CNBC:

The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.

I do not think it is worth reading too much into TikTok’s CEO writing that its new suggestions will be “free from outside manipulation”, or the implications that statement indicates for TikTok’s operations elsewhere.

Bobby Allyn, NPR:

Yet the underlying algorithm will still be owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with the blessing of American auditors, according to an internal TikTok memo reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly.

So if the underlying recommendations system still has connections to China, but it is retrained by a company run by a mix of far-right U.S. investors and a different foreign government, are those the ingredients for a social network with less state influence? Does this satisfy those who believe, without evidence, that TikTok is brainwashing people in the U.S. at the behest of the Chinese government?

MSC Cruises Bans Smart Glasses in Public Areas to Curb Covert Recording ⇥ bitdefender.com

Graham Cluley, writing on Bitdefender’s blog:

If you’re planning a cruise for your holidays, and cannot bear the idea of being parted from your Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, you may want to avoid sailing with MSC Cruises.

The cruise line has updated its list of prohibited items, specifically banning smart glasses and similar wearable devices from public areas.

MSC Cruises is prohibiting “devices capable of covertly or discreetly recording or transmitting data” which, as written, is pretty vague without the subsequent “(e.g. smart glasses)”. Any wireless device is arguably “discreetly … transmitting data” all the time. I appreciate the idea. However, I fear this is the kind of rule that will be remembered as a relic of a transitional period, rather than an honest commitment to guest privacy.

Four Winners and Losers of Apple’s 2025 ⇥ 512pixels.net

I truly love end-of-year lists, and Stephen Hackett sure has a good one: what are the highs and lows from Apple’s 2025? This is not what you would call comprehensive — look out for the Six Colors report card early next year, I am sure — but it is better for being concise.

Congratulations to Hackett for the final high point on his list.

From 2022, on Google’s Account Locking Practices ⇥ nytimes.com

In August 2022, Kashmir Hill reported for the New York Times on two fathers who had, in separate cases, captured photos of their toddlers’ genitals for medical documentation on Android phones, and subsequently had their Google accounts locked. Both accounts were erroneously flagged for containing child sexual abuse materials, a heinous accusation that both fought — unsuccessfully, as of the article’s publication.

I wrote about what I learned from that article and a different incident affecting a Gmail account belonging to Talking Points Memo. But I never linked to a followup article from December of the same year, which I stumbled across earlier today as I was looking into Paris Buttfield-Addison’s Apple account woes, now apparently resolved.

Hill:

In recent months The Times, reporting on the power that technology companies wield over the most intimate parts of their users’ lives, brought to Google’s attention several instances when its previous review process appeared to have gone awry.

In two separate cases, fathers took photos of their naked toddlers to facilitate medical treatment. An algorithm automatically flagged the images, and then human moderators deemed them in violation of Google’s rules. The police determined that the fathers had committed no crime, but the company still deleted their accounts.

I do not know if either of these accounts were restored. I have asked Hill on Bluesky and I hope to hear back. (Update: Hill says neither parent recovered their account, though one was able to retrieve some account data that was turned over to police.)

Hill:

It took four months for the mother in Colorado, who asked that her name not be used to protect her son’s privacy, to get her account back. Google reinstated it after The Times brought the case to the company’s attention.

This is well after Google says all the account data should have been deleted, which raises more questions.

In the Non-Clickbaitiest Way, I Ask: Can Redeeming an Apple Gift Card Put Your Account at Risk? ⇥ tidbits.com

The ridiculous and maddening situation in which Paris Buttfield-Addison finds himself continues to rattle around my brain. The idea that any one of us could be locked out from our Apple devices because some presumably automated system flagged the wrong thing is alarming.

Greg Morris:

The scale of dependency is what makes this different from older tech problems. Losing your email account twenty years ago was bad. Losing your iCloud account now means losing your photos, your passwords, your ability to access anything else. We’ve built these single points of failure into our lives and handed them to corporations who can cut us off for reasons they won’t explain. That’s not a sustainable system.

Morris is correct, and there is an equally worrisome question looming in the distance: when does Apple permanently delete the user data it holds? Apple does not say how long it retains data after an account is closed but, for comparison, Google says it takes about two months. Not only can one of these corporations independently decide to close an account, there is no way to know if it can be restored, and there is little help for users.

Adam Engst, TidBits:

I’d like to see Apple appoint an independent ombudsperson to advocate for customers. That’s a fantasy, of course, because it would require Apple to admit that its systems, engineers, and support techs sometimes produce grave injustices. But Apple is no worse in this regard than Google, Meta, Amazon, and numerous other tech companies — they all rely on automated fraud-detection systems that can mistakenly lock innocent users out of critical accounts, with little recourse.

This is a very good idea. Better consumer protection laws would obviously help, too, but Apple could do this tomorrow.

There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware. Sure, most Apple Gift Cards are probably safe, but do you really want to be the person who gives a close friend or beloved grandchild a compromised card that locks their Apple Account? And if someone gives you one, would you risk redeeming it? It’s digital Russian roulette.

I cannot tell you what to do, but I would not buy an Apple gift card for someone else, and I would not redeem one myself, until Apple clearly explains what happened here and what it will do to prevent something similar happening in the future. And, without implying anything untoward, it should restore Buttfield-Addison’s account unless there is a compelling reason why it should not.

When I bought my iMac through Apple’s refurbished store in 2019, the only credit card I had was one where I kept a deliberately low limit. The iMac was over $3,700. To get around my limit, I bought a $2,000 gift card and paid it off immediately, then put the remaining $1,700 and change on my credit card.

I did not think twice about the potential consequences if this had tripped some kind of fraud detection system. I cannot imagine doing something similar today given everything Buttfield-Addison has gone through.

Update: Buttfield-Addison:

Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. […]

This is good news. It also answers my trying-not-to-be-clickbait headline question: yes, a gift card can, in some circumstances and possibly without your foreknowledge, compromise your account. That is not okay. Also not okay is that we are unlikely to see a sufficient explanation of this problem. You are just supposed to trust that it will all be okay. I am not sure I can.

Screen Sizes Is a Great Apple Device Reference ⇥ screensizes.app

I keep meaning to link to Screen Sizes, a wonderful utility by Trevor Kay and Christopher Muller. It is a resource for developers and designers alike to reference the screen sizes, pixel dimensions, and various other attributes of Apple’s post-P.C. device lineup.

Something I need to do at my day job on a semi-regular basis is compositing a screenshot on a photo of someone holding or using an iPhone or an iPad. One of my pet peeves is when there is little attempt at realism — like when a screenshot is pasted over a notch, or the screen corners have an obviously incorrect radius. This is not out of protection for the integrity of Apple’s hardware design, per se; it just looks careless. I constantly refer to Screen Sizes to avoid these mistakes. I did so earlier today, which is why I was reminded to link to it.

It is a great free web app with even more resources than its name suggests.

Reuters: Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud From China to Safeguard Billions in Revenue ⇥ reuters.com

Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham, Reuters:

Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta’s advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company’s global revenue.

But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money – more than $3 billion – was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

According to Reuters’ interpretation of these documents, Meta’s internal efforts to reduce this fraud were hampered after Mark Zuckerberg intervened. Andy Stone disputes that characterization.

While “Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers” on Meta’s platforms, it should be noted that Meta also accepts advertising. The company is officially opposed to operating in China on free speech grounds — a stance it has now, but it was previously comfortable with compromising until it was spooked. It is not okay with the requirements imposed upon it to permit no-cost user participation, yet it is okay with accepting advertising dollars from companies offering the same speech compromises.

Meta continues to prove it has no principles. It never had any. At its heart, it runs on the same vibe of indifference to its broader impact that defined the earliest years of Facebook.

Locked Out of an Apple Account ⇥ hey.paris

Paris Buttfield-Addison:

My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years (it was originally a username, before they had to be email addresses; it’s from the iTools era), has been permanently disabled. This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity. It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.

[…]

The only recent activity on my account was a recent attempt to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card to pay for my 6TB iCloud+ storage plan. The code failed. The vendor suggested that the card number was likely compromised and agreed to reissue it. Shortly after, my account was locked.

This post has been circulating and, since publishing, Buttfield-Addison says he has been contacted by someone at Apple’s “Executive Relations”, but still does not have access to his account. I hope his situation is corrected promptly.

What I am stunned by is the breadth of impact this lockout has, and what a similar problem would mean for me, personally. I do not blame Buttfield-Addison or anyone else for having so much of their digital life ensconced in an Apple Account. Apple has effectively made it a requirement for using the features of its devices and, thanks to Apple’s policy of only trusting itself, creates limitations to using third-party services. You cannot automatically back up an iPhone or iPad to a third-party service, for example, in the same way as you can iCloud. Given this tight control, the bar for locking a user out of their Apple Account and, to some extent, out of their devices should be unbelievably high. Like, it should require the equivalent of a court order internally.

At the very least, software and services need a warranty. Customers need a level of protection from any corporation with which they are required to have an ongoing relationship. This single high-profile incident should raise alarm bells within Apple about its presumably-automatic account security mechanisms and its support procedures.

Boom Says Its Hypothetical Jet Engine Produces ‘Clean’ Electricity, and I Think Words Mean Things ⇥ boomsupersonic.com

Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom Supersonic:

Today, we’re announcing Superpower, our new 42‑megawatt natural gas turbine, along with a $300M funding round and Crusoe as our launch customer. And most importantly: this marks a turning point. Boom is now on a self-funded path to both Superpower and the Overture supersonic airliner.

As David Gerard points out, Boom’s proprietary engines are so far hypothetical, though I think Gerard gets a little over his skis in writing “[t]here’s no plan for the Overture plane”. The company’s demonstrator plane broke the sound barrier earlier this year; clearly, the company is not operating entirely in fiction.

The promotional video for this Superpower generator promises “42 megawatts of clean electricity”. This is, I will remind you, powered by a jet engine. I think even an advertising standards body used to hyperbole would question that definition of “clean”.

Apple Releases 26.2 Operating System Updates ⇥ macobserver.com

Rajat Saini, the Mac Observer:

Apple has started rolling out macOS Tahoe 26.2 to everyone. Apple seeded macOS 26.2 RC (build 25C56) earlier this month, and that same update is now available publicly through Software Update.

I have found the version of Safari in this build of MacOS 26.2 is noticeably buggy. It sometimes stops letting me scroll a webpage and, in rare cases, I have found the browser wholly crashes when closing tabs. I am not saying you will have the same experience but, if you are dependent on Safari and you are comfortable navigating now-public security problems, now you know to proceed with some caution. I have not seen these same bugs on my iPhone running iOS 26.2.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Incredibly Private and Secure Safari Web Browsing ⇥ magiclasso.co

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Me, on ‘People and Blogs’ ⇥ manuelmoreale.com

I really like Manuel Moreale’s “People and Blogs” series where different writers pull back the curtain and reflect on their process and goals. So I was a little surprised when Moreale asked if I would like to contribute, too.

I feel like I am a terrible interview subject; maybe I should have added a few more jokes. But I like this series so much I felt compelled to add my brick to the wall.

Instagram and Facebook Users in Europe to Get Option of Sharing Less Data ⇥ digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

The European Commission acknowledges Meta’s undertaking to offer users in the EU an alternative choice of Facebook and Instagram services that would show them less personalised ads, to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is the first time that such a choice is offered on Meta’s social networks. Meta will give users the effective choice between: consenting to share all their data and seeing fully personalised advertising, and opting to share less personal data for an experience with more limited personalised advertising. Meta will present these new options to users in the EU in January 2026.

Good. Meta should have the option to charge users if it wants to compensate for a revenue difference between surveillance-powered ads and less creepy ads, but users should not be forced to choose between paying or sacrificing their right to privacy. If Meta’s business cannot be sufficiently profitable without conning a bunch of people, it should have a different business model.

Adam Satariano, New York Times:

Meta downplayed Monday’s announcement, saying it was making changes to the wording, design and transparency of existing policy.

“We acknowledge the European Commission’s statement,” the company said in a statement, adding that “personalized ads are vital for Europe’s economy.”

Meta might be trying to save face, but a year ago, it was so distraught as to file a legal complaint to retain its “pay or consent” model.

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.

Also, 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.