‘Mood Machine’

The goals of art and commerce are basically opposite. Art fills our soul; it gives us emotional life. I have rarely heard anyone describe commerce similarly.

At its most ideal, the business of art enables more of it in greater variety, while allowing those who create it a reasonable living. This has rarely been the case. There are hundreds of years of unbelievably wealthy patrons building their cultural cachet by supporting artists of their particular taste and at their behest. More recently, recording contracts are routinely described as “brutal”, “a raw deal”, “predatory”, and “exploitative”. That has been generally true for all artists, but has been particularly pronounced for marginalized — and, to be more even specific, black — artists since the recording industry’s origins.

In “Mood Machine”, released earlier this year, Liz Pelly adds an additional complicating question: what is the relationship between art and commerce when massive data collection becomes routine?

The origins of streaming music may be found first in piracy and later in Rhapsody, but Spotify is where modern streaming platforms truly began. While Spotify’s founders tend to describe a noble birth, Perry points to a 2015 interview with co-founder Martin Lorentzon in which he describes the idea to build a targeted advertising platform first. How it would acquire users was an open question — “[s]hould it be product search? Should it be movies, [or ‘Godfather’], or audiobooks? And then we ended up with music”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. What is bad, though, is that Spotify reportedly began with an unlicensed library and made money on the back of it. That combination does not sound to me like the result of a love of music.

Sadly, the interesting storytelling does not reliably continue. Admittedly, part of the reason for this is my personal distaste for Pelly’s style of writing, something which I would not normally mention — surely not everyone is a fan of my writing style, either — but feel compelled to do so for how intrusive I found it. Far too many sections and chapters in this book end in a tedious turn of phrase: “Under the gaze of streaming surveillance, the exchange is never truly one-to-one;”; “It makes sense that as the digital world has grown to feel more like a shopping mall, it is also sometimes the very companies making music for shopping malls that are flooding its soundtrack”. Another part of the problem is the way this book is organized. Each chapter reads like an individual essay dedicated to a specific problem with Spotify — algorithmic suggestions, vibe-based playlists, and changing business terms, to name a few. What that looks like in practice is a great deal of repetition. I count at least seven chapters, of eighteen, dedicated to background and unfocused listening.

Part of the problem, however, is that Pelly has been documenting these phenomena for years in articles published at the Baffler. I am familiar with the extraordinary amount of “chill” music, trendy sound palettes, the relationship between mood-based music and targeted advertising, and the comparisons to Uber because these articles were all published a minimum of six years ago. That I remember these articles is sometimes a testament to Pelly’s reporting; at other times, it reminds me of things I previously found questionable but could not quite articulate why.

One thing I remember from one article, for example, is its attempt to define a “Spotify sound”. This was revisited in the book in the “Streambait Pop” chapter (page 82):

By the time of Spotify’s IPO in 2018, it seemed that the peak playlist era had produced an aesthetic of its own. That year, one pop songwriter and producer told me that [Billie] Eilish had become a type of poster child for what was being called a “Spotify sound,” a deluge of platform-optimized pop that was muted, mid-tempo, and melancholy. He told me it had become normal for him to go into a session and hear someone say they wanted to write a “Spotify song” to pitch around to artists: “I’ve definitely been in circumstances where people are saying, ‘Let’s make one of those sad girl Spotify songs.’ You give yourself a target,” he said. It was a formula. “It has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it. These days it’s often really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples. It’s usually kind of emo in lyrical nature.”

Pelly’s argument is built primarily around the works of Charlotte Lawrence, Sasha Sloan, and Nina Nesbitt, none of which I am familiar with. But their music — “Normal” and “Psychopath” are both named in the article — sound like a lot of pop music trends of the time: a blend of genres that emerges kind of beach-clubby, pretty breathy, and electronics-heavy but not particularly danceable. Pelly quotes an indie rock label owner calling it “emotional wallpaper”.

In re-reading Pelly’s “streambait” article for this piece, I found this paragraph a good distillation of many arguments made throughout the book:

Musical trends produced in the streaming era are inherently connected to attention, whether it’s hard-and-fast attention-grabbing hooks, pop drops and chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains, or music that strategically requires no attention at all—the background music, the emotional wallpaper, the chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder. These sounds and strategies all have streambait tricks embedded within them, whether they aim to wedge bits of a song into our skulls or just angle toward the inoffensive and mood-specific-enough to prevent users from clicking away. All of this caters to an economy of clicks and completions, where the most precious commodity is polarized human attention — either amped up or zoned out—and where success is determined, almost in advance, by data.

Much like the similar essays in “Mood Machine”, very little of this feels like it is directly traceable to Spotify or streaming generally. There has long been pop music that is earwormy, and pop music that is kind of a silence-filler. When radio was more influential, the former could be found on the contemporary hit radio station and the latter on any number of adult contemporary variants.

Coalescing around a particular sound is also not a Spotify phenomenon. The early 1990s brought an onslaught of Nirvana imitators, and the late 1990s polished the sound so hard it removed any trace of edge and intrigue it once held. The early-2000s dominance of Coldplay made way for the mid-2000s Timbaland production craze, which led to a wave of late-2000s dance and club pop, which was followed in the early-2010s by Americana revival. This is the power of radio. Or, it was the power of radio, at least. You could describe any of the chart-topping songs in similar terms as Pelly uses for “streambait”: “attention-grabbing hooks”, “chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains”, and “chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder”. Should this be blamed on the precise listener analytics dashboard available to artists on Spotify? I am not sufficiently convinced.

Pelly describes a discussion she had with two teenagers outside an all-ages venue as they struggled to describe the “aesthetic rap” show they were attending, a genre which seems to be a slower and spacier take on rage (page 118):

The kids I spoke to outside Market seemed genuinely enthused. But as I headed home, I was struck by how palpably it seemed that most of those conversations were more concerned with a niche vibe fandom — which no one could even really explain — than the artists themselves.

I cannot imagine this is a new phenomenon. Some people develop a deep fascination with music and seek releases from specific artists. But plenty are only looking for a sound and a vibe. It is why retailers and magazines gave away sampler CDs in the mid-2000s scratching a generic indie rock itch.

What Pelly keeps describing in these chapters is a kind of commodification of cool, none of which is new or unique to Spotify. It is the story of popular culture writ large: things begin as cool for a small group, are absorbed into broader society, and are sold back to us by industry. This most often happens to marginalized communities who find community in vocabulary, music, visual art, and dance, and then it gets diluted as it becomes mainstreamed.

As noted, Pelly dedicates considerable space in the book to chill playlists — “‘Chilled Dance Hits,’ ‘Chilled R&B,’ and ‘Chilled Reggae’ were all among Spotify’s official playlist offerings, alongside collections like ‘Chillin’ on a Dirt Road,’ ‘lofi chill,’ and ‘Calm.'” (page 45). This is partly not the fault of Spotify; YouTube expanded the availability of live streams in 2013 and it resulted in plenty of samey chill hop stations. In a 2018 New York Times article about these nonstop live-streams, Jonah E. Bromwich writes:

Channels like College Music, ChilledCow, Chillhop Music and others are unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry. But they represent an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music. The industry commentator Bob Lefsetz said that while the stations were not likely to become a lucrative endeavor, they were a way for members of the public to seize power back from cultural gatekeepers.

Instead of being predominantly inspired or encouraged by Spotify, it is possible the growth of the background music genre is something the company is instead taking advantage of — and take advantage it did.

Whether on YouTube or Spotify, the beat-makers behind these tracks are loosely inspired by artists like J Dilla, but they have coalesced around a distinctly hazy and slowed-down instrumental palette. That these tracks are deliberately indistinct has led to Spotify commissioning low-royalty generic tracks and, as Pelly writes, this passivity is an area “where the imminent A.I. infiltration of music was most feasible: the replacement of lean-back mood music” (page 132).

All told, it sure sounds like Spotify aligned its recommendations to compel users into filling silence with music featureless enough it could be replicated by what are, in effect, stock tracks. If this was a deliberate strategy to allow Spotify to have lower royalty expenses, it has had a mixed effect. Setting aside the ongoing popularity of big pop stars like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber — I would love to know how much of Spotify’s revenue is sent to those two artists alone — the rise of streaming also coincided with the explosion of in-your-face K-pop groups, renewed interest in rock music, and revivals of funk and disco. These are not the kinds of passive listening genres Pelly seems so concerned with.

That is not to say Spotify plays no influence in what is popular. Just as what was made popular on the radio brought a wave of imitators, so too is the case for an era where streaming is where most people listen to music. None of this is new. A streaming listener’s context is often quite similar to a radio listener’s, too. Pelly’s exploration of the chilled-out Spotify playlist and lean-back listener reads, to me, with considerable disdain. But that kind of passive listening was common in the radio days. People put music on in the car and at work all the time. My parents used to put a C.D. on when they were cooking dinner. I do not think they were captivated in that moment by the sounds of Genesis or the Police. I was listening to music while reading this book and writing this article. Sometimes, an album will get played as a background to other tasks; any musician is surely aware of this.

Perhaps you, too, are now seeing what I began to understand. What Pelly keeps gesturing at throughout this book — but never quite reaches — is that the problems Spotify faces are similar to that of any massive two-sided platform. Pick your case study of any of the large tech companies and you can find parallels in Spotify. It has hundreds of millions of subscribers; everything it does is at vast scale.

It has privacy problems. Pelly dedicates a chapter to “Streaming as Surveillance”, pointing to Spotify’s participation in the data broker and ad tech economy. Spotify suggests its ads can be targeted based on users’ moods correlated with playlist and song data. This, like so many other ad tech sales pitches, is likely an inflated claim with only limited success. Yet it is also a little creepy to consider it is what Spotify aspires its ad product to be.

Spotify, like many others, faces moderation problems. Spotify does not want to put too many limits on what music is accepted. In the best of circumstances, this makes it possible for a nascent artist to rise from obscurity and start a career. But there are financial incentives to gaming the system. There are people who will follow trends, and even commit outright fraud manually or with A.I.-generated material. This is true for other broadly available revenue machines — Google Ads and YouTube are two that immediately spring to mind. In an attempt to disincentivize these behaviours and reduce Spotify’s costs, the company announced in November 2023 it would stop paying royalties for tracks with fewer than one thousand annual streams. Pelly writes this “was part of a campaign waged by Universal Music Group to revamp streaming in its favor” (page 155). When Spotify rolled out this new royalty structure, UMG CEO Lucian Grainge bade good riddance to “merchants of garbage […] no one actually wants to listen to” (page 157). How much it actually hurts low-effort spammers is a good question, but it impacts legitimate indie artists — what Grainge calls “garbage” — for whom Spotify now presents no advantage over piracy.

I would not be so presumptuous as to say that is what this book ought to have been but, as a longtime reader of Pelly’s articles about the subject, I was frustrated by “Mood Machine”. It is the kind of book I wish would be taken apart and reassembled for better flow and a more coherent structure. Spotify and the streaming model have problems. “Mood Machine” identifies many of them. But the money quote — the one that cut through everything for me — is from an anonymous former Spotify employee (page 167):

“If Spotify is guilty of something, they had the opportunity at one point to change the way value was exhanged in the music industry, and they decided not to,” the former employee told me. “So it’s just upholding the way that things have always been.”

We treat art terribly. It is glamorous and alluring, but it is ultimately a plaything of the rich. The people who make money in art, no matter the discipline, are those responsible for its distribution, management, and sale. Those creating the actual work that enriches our lives too often get the scraps, unless they have enough cachet to dictate the terms in their favour.

Spotify is just another layer in the chain; another place that makes far more money than artists ever will. An artist understands they are signing up for a job with unpredictable pay, but Spotify’s particular structure makes it even more opaque.

The four biggest audio streaming platforms — Spotify, YouTube, Tencent, and Apple Music are the top-down force pushing culture in a particular direction, a level of influence Clear Channel’s executives could have only hoped for in its heyday. Streaming can help people learn about music they have never heard before. But it is not very effective as an artistic conduit. It is an ad-supported platform operating at global scale, much like a handful of other large tech companies, and it faces similar problems.

Yet none of them are as essentially tied to the distribution of art as is Spotify. It is a shame it did not create something to upend the status quo and made more artists more money. I guess part of the reason for that could be because its co-founders saw music as one of several interchangeable user acquisition strategies to sell advertisements — you know, for the love of art and music.

Google Says A.I. Search Is Just Great ⇥ blog.google

Liz Reid, Google’s vice president of search:

Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year. Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago (by quality clicks, we mean those where users don’t quickly click back — typically a signal that a user is interested in the website). This data is in contrast to third-party reports that inaccurately suggest dramatic declines in aggregate traffic — often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search.

What “relatively stable” means is not explained and, incredibly, not a single number is used in this press release about quantifiable data. However, even giving Google an unearned benefit of the doubt, the company also says people “are searching more than ever”. If more searches are being done but the number of clicks is “relatively stable”, it effectively confirms a dropping click-through rate. None of this counters or disproves publishers’ findings of declining Google referral traffic. Even if aggregate traffic from Google has not dropped significantly, it is not clear it is going to the same places in similar amounts.

A big problem Google has is that it closely guards everything related to search, ostensibly to reduce gaming its ranking factors, and it is not a trustworthy narrator. It intuitively makes sense for A.I. Overviews to damage search traffic. We just do not know for which websites and by how much, and Reid’s post provides no clarity.

Reid:

The web has existed for over three decades, and we believe we’re entering its most exciting era yet. […]

As of the day this was published, exactly 34 years since the first website was launched.

Tim Cook Gives Donald Trump a Gold Trophy and, Legally Speaking, Expects Nothing in Return ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

Apple today announced a new $100 billion commitment to America, a significant acceleration of its U.S. investment that now totals $600 billion over the next four years. Today’s announcement includes the ambitious new American Manufacturing Program (AMP), dedicated to bringing even more of Apple’s supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the U.S. Through AMP, Apple will increase its investment across America and incentivize global companies to manufacture even more critical components in the United States.

Is someone keeping track of the results of these commitments? Please let me know.

“Today, we’re proud to increase our investments across the United States to $600 billion over four years and launch our new American Manufacturing Program,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “This includes new and expanded work with 10 companies across America. They produce components that are used in Apple products sold all over the world, and we’re grateful to the President for his support.”

I think Cook is also grateful to the president for exempting the company from new tariffs. Cook showed his appreciation by giving the president a glass and twenty-four karat gold memento, which is not a bribe.

Call it whatever you want, but Cook now finds himself trying to appease the presidents of both the United States and China. The goals of each are in opposition, yet either one could make a move imperilling Apple. When his time at Apple ends, Cook may wish to be remembered as a diplomat, but that word will always carry the vibe of euphemism.

The New Macintosh HD Icon Just Looks Kinda Bad ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple has been updating some classic Mac icons during the macOS Tahoe beta, upsetting some longtime Mac users who prefer the original look. In beta 5, Apple changed the design of the built-in Mac storage icon, which you’ll notice if you have it on your desktop.

I want to put a finer point on the problem with this icon: it is not a mere aesthetic preference or a reaction to change, but a simple acknowledgement that this icon is not good. It has a generic quality, a lack of personality. The perspective does not make sense, either. It is just a sad grey box without any connection to literal data storage on a modern Mac, the “Macintosh HD” label beside it on the Desktop, or any object in the real world. It feels like a first draft. I know we are still in the beta process, but I have little confidence it will progress much beyond what we see now.

Ghost Ships Version Six ⇥ ghost.org

Ghost:

The next major version of Ghost has arrived, and our 6.0 release is packed full of more upgrades and improvements than you can shake a stick at.

The headline feature is integration with the modern social web, including ActivityPub and the AT Protocol, but I think the most impressive thing is integrated cookie-less first-party analytics. This will allow some Ghost publishers to dispense with invasive third-party providers.

If Ghost added MarsEdit support, I would be awful tempted to switch from WordPress. I would rather use a platform that seems to care fundamentally about words on a webpage more than being a do-it-all CMS.

Tiny Awards 2025 Nominations ⇥ tinyawards.net

This year, eleven candidates compete for World Wide Web glory. Who will win? Will it be the cheeky Internet Roadtrip? The thoughtful Fifty Thousand Names? The absurd Traffic Cam Photo Booth? You can vote for your favourite until 1 September.

Google Changes Plans for Shortened Goo.gl Links ⇥ blog.google

Google in July last year:

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.

Over time, these existing URLs saw less and less traffic as the years went on – in fact more than 99% of them had no activity in the last month.

As such, we will be turning off Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this may impact you.

Google last week:

While we previously announced discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs after August 25, 2025, we’ve adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links.

We understand these links are embedded in countless documents, videos, posts and more, and we appreciate the input received.

This sounds like a big change, but it is a very small one — according to Google’s statistics, the ongoing support affects less than 1% of all shortened links. If you used Google’s URL shortener and have not actively been looking for goo.gl links since last year’s announcement, your links are probably going to stop working this month, and you might not know where they redirect.

Also, even though Google says it is “discontinuing support for all goo.gl URLs”, this is not true either. Google continues to use that domain for shared links created from its own apps like Maps and Photos. It says in its post from last year those links will continue to work. I think this is the original sin of this URL shortener and why the company is reluctant to keep supporting it. Google should never have used the same domain for trusted links it created and untrusted URLs from users. This is a problem that can be solved by, say, an interstitial notice of where the short URL is redirecting, but I think Google just wants to wash its hands of the whole thing regardless of the impact it will have.

Device Added to Your Account ⇥ morrick.me

Riccardo Mori:

Now, with these older iOS devices in particular, battery life is what it is, and I don’t always remember to keep them all charged at all times. It happens with my Mac laptops as well. Whenever I revive one of these devices, if it’s still able to access iCloud and other Apple ID-related services, I get a notification on all my other Apple devices that a certain device has now access to FaceTime and iMessage.

The wording in this notification has changed for the worse in more recent versions of Mac OS and iOS/iPadOS. […]

Michael Tsai:

The alert doesn’t actually mean that the the device was added in the user sense. Most of the time the device was already in my account, but a software update or something meant that Apple needed to do some kind of key refresh. It feels like I’m being interrupted for an implementation detail.

I do not see this as frequently as, it seems, Mori or Tsai — I do not have a stable of old devices I rotate between, nor am I a software developer. When I do, it is almost never because I have purchased a new device. It is usually because of, as Tsai writes, a software update or perhaps adding a travel SIM, so it is poorly confirming something I already know in an interruptive and ambiguous way. Occasionally, the software update was installed automatically, so I am surprised by the alert on a different device but have no way of understanding what happened. Then I think about what I should actually do with this information, particularly with the revised wording of this alert:

Your Apple ID and phone number are now being used for iMessage on a new Mac.

If you recently signed in to “[Device Name]”, you can ignore this notification.

[OK]

What do I do now? That is rhetorical; I understand I would search it. (I also asked Siri on iOS 26 — you know, the one with the product knowledge — and it, too, searched Google.) But what does a normal person do now? This is scary and unhelpful, yet the user interface says in the same breath it might be irrelevant.

It reminds me a little of the often-wrong map in the dialog box for two-factor authentication. These are features ostensibly to promote greater security but they only erode users’ awareness if they are not designed with more precision and care.

LinkedIn Removes Hate Speech Protections for Transgender Individuals ⇥ opentermsarchive.org

Matti Schneider, documenting this for Open Terms Archive:

LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.

Via Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

This follows the now-familiar playbook we’ve seen from Meta, YouTube, and others. Meta rewrote its policies in January to allow content calling LGBTQ+ people “mentally ill” and portraying trans identities as “abnormal.” YouTube quietly scrubbed “gender identity” from its hate speech policies, then had the audacity to call it “regular copy edits.” Now LinkedIn is doing the same cowardly dance.

Any one of these platform changes is dispiriting and upsetting; that it is part of a pattern to, I guess, avoid scrutiny from a government demanding subservience is pretty obvious. But there is something about it being LinkedIn — the lukewarm social network for middle management to broadcast their “work” — that makes it a specific kind of evil. Now professional connections can harass people for who they are. Appalling.

Also, worth a reminder that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and profile information can be integrated into Microsoft 365.

The Vagueness and Vagaries of ‘Personal Superintelligence’

Mark Zuckerberg is not much of a visionary. He is ambitious, sure, and he has big ideas. He occasionally pops into the public consciousness to share some new direction in which he is taking his company — a new area of focus that promises to assert his company’s leadership in technology and society. But very little of it seems to bear fruit or be based on a coherent set of principles.

For example, due to Meta’s scale, it is running into limitations on its total addressable market based on global internet connectivity. It has therefore participated in several related projects, like measuring the availability of internet connectivity worldwide with the Economist, which has not been updated since 2022. In 2014, it acquired a company building a solar-powered drone to beam service to people in more remote locations; the project was cancelled in 2018. It made a robot to wrap fibre optic cable around existing power lines, which it licensed to Hibot in 2023; Hibot has nothing on its website about the robot.

It is not just Meta’s globe-spanning ambitions that have faltered. In 2019, Zuckerberg outlined a “privacy-focused vision for social networking” for what was then Facebook, the core tenets of which in no way conflict with the company’s targeted advertising business. Aside from the things I hope Facebook was already doing — data should be stored securely, private interactions should remain private, and so on — there were some lofty goals. Zuckerberg said the company should roll out end-to-end encrypted messaging across its product line; that it should add controls to automatically delete or hide posts after some amount of time; that its products should be extremely interoperable with those from third-parties. As of writing, Meta added end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger and Instagram, but it is only on by default for Facebook. (WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted by default already.) It has not added an automatic post deletion feature to Facebook or Instagram. Its apps remain stubbornly walled-off. You cannot even sign into a third-party Mastodon app with a Threads account, even though it is amongst the newest and most interoperable offerings from Meta.

Zuckerberg published that when it was advantageous for the company to be seen as doing its part for user privacy. Similarly, when it was smart to advocate for platform safety, Zuckerberg was contrite:

But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough. We didn’t focus enough on preventing abuse and thinking through how people could use these tools to do harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, in addition to developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake. It was my mistake.

Then, when it became a good move to be brash and arrogant, Zuckerberg put on a gold chain and a million-dollar watch to explain how platform moderation had gone too far.

To be clear, Meta has not entirely failed with these initiatives. As mentioned, Threads is relatively interoperable, and the company defaulted to end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger in 2023. It said earlier this year it is spending $10 billion on a massive sub-sea cable, which is a proven technology to expand connectivity more than a solar-powered drone could.

But I have so far not mentioned the metaverse. According to Zuckerberg, this is “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”, and it was worth pivoting the entire company to be “metaverse-first”. The company renamed itself “Meta”. Zuckerberg forecasted an “Altria moment” a few years prior and the press noticed. In announcing this new direction in 2021, Zuckerberg acknowledged it would be a long-term goal, though predicted it would be “mainstream in the next five to ten years”:

Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

Granted, it has not been even four years since Zuckerberg made these announcements, but are we any closer to his company’s vision becoming mainstream? If you broaden the definition of “metaverse” to include all augmented and virtual reality products then, yes, it appears to be a growing industry. But the vision shown at Connect 2021 is scarcely anywhere to be found. We are not attending virtual concerts or buying virtual merch at virtual after-parties. I am aching to know how the metaverse real estate market is doing as I am unaware of anyone I know living in a virtual house.

As part of this effort, Meta announced in May 2022 it would support NFTs on Instagram. These would be important building blocks for the metaverse, the company said, “critical for how people will buy, use and share virtual objects and experiences” in the virtual environment it was building. Meta quickly expanded availability to Facebook and rolled it out worldwide. Then, in March 2023, it ended support for NFTs altogether, saying “[a]ny collectibles you’ve already shared will remain as posts, but no blockchain info will be displayed”.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly changed direction on what his company is supposed to stand for. He has plenty of ideas, sure, and they are often the kinds of things requiring resources in an amount only possible for a giant corporation like the one he runs. And he has done it again by dedicating Meta’s efforts to what he is calling — in a new manifesto, open letter, mission statement, or whatever this is — “personal superintelligence”.

I do have to take a moment to acknowledge the bizarre quality of this page. It is ostensibly a minimalist and unstyled document of near-black Times New Roman on a white background — very hacker, very serious. It contains about 3,800 characters, which should mean a document barely above four or five kilobytes, accounting for HTML tags and a touch of CSS. Yet it is over 400 kilobytes. Also, I love that keywords are defined:

<meta name="keywords" content="Personal 
Superintelligence, AI systems improvement, 
Superintelligence vision, Mark Zuckerberg 
Meta, Human empowerment AI, Future of 
technology, AI safety and risks, Personal
AI devices, Creativity and culture with 
AI, Meta AI initiatives">

Very retro.

Anyway, what is “superintelligence”? is a reasonable question you may ask, and a term which Zuckerberg does not define. I guess it is supposed to be something more than or different from artificial intelligence, which is yesterday’s news:

As profound as the abundance produced by AI may one day be, an even more meaningful impact on our lives will likely come from everyone having a personal superintelligence that helps you achieve your goals, create what you want to see in the world, experience any adventure, be a better friend to those you care about, and grow to become the person you aspire to be.

He decries competitors’ ambitions:

This is distinct from others in the industry who believe superintelligence should be directed centrally towards automating all valuable work, and then humanity will live on a dole of its output. At Meta, we believe that people pursuing their individual aspirations is how we have always made progress expanding prosperity, science, health, and culture. This will be increasingly important in the future as well.

I am unsure what to make of this. It is sorely tempting to dismiss the whole endeavour as little more than words on a page for a company deriving 98% of its revenue (PDF) from advertising.1 If we consider it more seriously, however, we are left with an ugly impression for what “valuable work” may consist of. Meta is very proud of its technology to “generate photorealistic images”, thereby taking the work of artists and photographers. Examples of its technology also include generating blog posts and building study plans, so it seems writing and tutoring are not entirely “valuable work” either.

I am being a bit cheeky but, with Zuckerberg’s statement entirely devoid of specifics, I am also giving it the gravitas it has earned.

While I was taking way too long to write this, Om Malik examined it from the perspective of someone who has followed Zuckerberg’s career trajectory since it began. It is a really good piece. Though Malik starts by saying “Zuck is one of the best ‘chief executives’ to come out of Silicon Valley”, he concludes by acknowledging he is “skeptical of his ability to invent a new future for his company”:

Zuck has competitive anxiety. By repeatedly talking about being “distinct from others in the industry” he is tipping his hand. He is worried that Meta is being seen as a follower rather than leader. Young people are flocking to ChatGPT. Programmers are flocking to Claude Code.

What does Meta AI do? Bupkiss. And Zuck knows that very well. You don’t do a company makeover if things are working well.

If you are solely looking at Meta’s earnings, things seem to be working just fine for the company. Meta beat revenue expectations in its most recent quarter while saying the current quarter will also be better than analysts thought. Meta might not be meeting already-low analyst expectations for revenue in its Reality Labs metaverse segment, but the stock jumped by 10% anyhow. Even Wall Street is not taking Zuckerberg seriously as an innovator. Meta is great at selling ads. It is not very exciting, but it works.

Back to the superintelligence memo, emphasis mine:

We believe the benefits of superintelligence should be shared with the world as broadly as possible. That said, superintelligence will raise novel safety concerns. We’ll need to be rigorous about mitigating these risks and careful about what we choose to open source. Still, we believe that building a free society requires that we aim to empower people as much as possible.

And here is what Zuckerberg wrote just one year ago:

Meta is committed to open source AI. I’ll outline why I believe open source is the best development stack for you, why open sourcing Llama is good for Meta, and why open source AI is good for the world and therefore a platform that will be around for the long term.

[…]

There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it’s in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer.

No mention of being careful, no mention of choosing what to open source. Zuckerberg took an ostensibly strong, principled view supportive of open source A.I. when it benefitted the company, and is now taking an ostensibly strong, principled view that it requires more nuance.

Zuckerberg concludes:

Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.

On this, I kind of believe him. I believe the company has the resources and reach to make “personal superintelligence” — whatever it is — a central part of Meta’s raison d’être, just as Malik says in his article he has “learned not to underestimate Zuckerberg”. The language in Zuckerberg’s post is flexible, vague, and optimistic enough to provide cover for whatever the company does next. It could be a unique virtual assistant, or it could be animated stickers in chats. Whatever it is, this technology will also assuredly be directed toward the company’s advertising machine, as its current A.I. efforts are providing “greater efficiency and gains across our ad system”. Zuckerberg is telling investors imagine what we could do with superintelligence.

In December 2023, Simon Willison wrote about the trust crisis in artificial intelligence, comparing it to the conspiracy theory that advertisers use audio from real-world conversations for targeting:

The key issue here is the same as the OpenAI training issue: people don’t believe these companies when they say that they aren’t doing something.

One interesting difference here is that in the Facebook example people have personal evidence that makes them believe they understand what’s going on.

With AI we have almost the complete opposite: AI models are weird black boxes, built in secret and with no way of understanding what the training data was or how it influences the model.

Meta has pulled off a remarkable feat. It has ground down users’ view of their own privacy into irrelevance, yet its services remain ubiquitous to the point of being essential. Maybe Meta does not need trust for its A.I. or “superintelligence” ambitions, either. It is unfathomably rich, has a huge volume of proprietary user data, and a CEO who keeps pushing forward despite failing at basically every quasi-visionary project. Maybe that is enough.

  1. Do note two slides later the company’s effective tax rate dropping from 17% in Q3 and Q4 2023 to just 9% in Q1 2025, and 11% in the most recent quarter. Nine percent on over $18 billion in income. ↥︎

The ‘Panama Playlists’ Reveal the Spotify Profiles of Public Figures ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

Have you ever wondered what bops powerful figures are listening to on Spotify? You’d be amazed what you can get with a profile search — but just in case you want them all in one place, there’s the Panama Playlists, a newly published collection of data on the musical listening habits of politicians, journalists, and tech figures, as curated by an anonymous figure.

Silly name aside, I am glad to finally have a privacy-related concern that is not actually so bad. Yes, some people confirmed to Lopatto that they were unaware they were sharing their playlists publicly, but at least it is not private data per se. And it gives us a relatively non-creepy peek into the lives of the rich and famous. For example, Marc Benioff has a terrible “High Energy Party” playlists into which he has dumped whole albums with seeming disregard to vibe consistency or quality — it is simply a massive amount of songs from the Black Eyed Peas, Metallica, and Beatles tribute bands, plus one lonely song by the Doors. The art of the playlist is dead.

The Tim Cook Era Is Fully Cemented ⇥ wolframalpha.com

On 16 September 1997, Steve Jobs became interim CEO of Apple. 5,090 days later, he handed the reins to Tim Cook, weeks before he died.

5,090 days after 24 August 2011 is today. The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.

Just as it is baffling to consider how much time Cook has officially led Apple — I have not included the two times when he temporarily took on the role for reasons of Jobs’ health — it is hard for me to believe the same amount of time has now passed which solidified so much of today’s Apple. You already know the highlights: the iMac, Mac OS X, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. All that and more happened between September 1997 and August 2011.

Apple was given new life under Jobs’ leadership. That relatively small group of people set the groundwork for it to become, under Cook, the giant it is today. I thought it was worth marking the day this era has overtaken the last.

The State of Design and the Iconfactory ⇥ mastodon.social

Sean Heber, on Mastodon:

ChatGPT and other AI services are basically killing @Iconfactory and I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolical.

Ged Maheux, on the company’s blog:

Our apps deserve more love than we can currently give. We’re looking to find new homes for our side products – many of which have storied histories and loads of happy & loyal customers.

It does not sound like this includes Linea Sketch, Tapestry, Tot, or Wallaroo, but I am not sure it is limited to the smaller free apps like Clicker or Fontcase, either.

This sure is a worrisome sign for the Iconfactory. Unfortunately, the trends of the past many years have not been kind to studios like theirs, and a future of thoughtless generative design and enforced mediocrity is ominous. I wish them only the best.

Tiger Inspirat Is a Tribute to the Best Mac OS X Default Desktop Picture ⇥ keiransell.com

You all know I love the default Tiger desktop picture. It is a perfect shade of blue, and just the right balance of visual interest and neutrality. Sadly, it was only ever released at a maximum size of 2560 × 1600 pixels — slightly smaller, even, than the resolution of today’s 13-inch MacBook Air. I filed a radar many years ago asking Apple to release a high-resolution version without result. However, there are two great third-party options.

Hector Simpson made an excellent set a few years ago that has received colour scheme updates all the way through MacOS Sequoia.

Keir Ansell also published a set with his own take on a range of mostly blues and grey. Ansell has just added a variant based on the colour scheme of the MacOS Tahoe desktop picture.

I love both sets and, if you are as enthusiastic about this era of Mac OS X wallpapers as I am, I think you will too. Simpson’s set is $4 and Ansell’s is $5, though the standard Aqua variant is free.

I should also mention Stephen Hackett’s excellent high-res gallery of Mac desktop pictures, including upscaled versions of older images. Aside from Tiger, I am partial to the Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion space pictures.

Tea Spilled ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

Tea, which claims to have more than 1.6 million users, reached the top of the App Store charts this week and has tens of thousands of reviews there. The app aims to provide a space for women to exchange information about men in order to stay safe, and verifies that new users are women by asking them to upload a selfie.

“Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It’s a public bucket,” a post on 4chan providing details of the vulnerability reads. “DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!”

This is ghastly. It seems possible Tea did not do even the most basic step of stripping location metadata from submitted photos.

Maiberg and Cox, 404 Media:

A second, major security issue with women’s dating safety app Tea has exposed much more user data than the first breach we first reported last week, with an independent security researcher now finding it was possible for hackers to access messages between users discussing abortions, cheating partners, and phone numbers they sent to one another. Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researcher’s findings that 404 Media verified. The researcher said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of Tea’s users.

Lots of apps have insecure or poorly secured cloud data buckets, and their data gets leaked, and that really sucks. Given the function of Tea and the deserved reputation of 4chan, however, this seems to be driven by motivations greater than a typical breach. In my head, it aligns with the politically motivated breaches of university data.

It is entirely possible this is nothing more than hackers getting lucky, and they were not picking Tea specifically. Fine. Tea should have anticipated the possibility it is a greater target because of the function it serves.

From Tea’s response:

Why did you require IDs prior to end of 2023?

During our early stages of development, we required selfies and IDs as an added layer of safety to ensure that only women were signing up for the app. In 2023, we removed the ID requirement.

Shoshana Weissmann, of the R Street Institute:

Security is dependent in no small part on norms. Understanding how to spot a phishing email, not to share one’s two-factor authentication code, or how to recognize a scam call are all examples of norms that bolster security. Yet when people are increasingly encouraged to share their most sensitive information — photo IDs, Social Security numbers, face scans — across websites and apps, they will begin to feel comfortable doing so. Offering up sensitive data could become a reflexive act like agreeing to terms of service documents. However, people cannot be sure how this data will be stored and used. In this case, Tea could not have been adhering to its privacy policy regarding its data storage, which before now might have assuaged fears of people concerned how their information might be stored or used. Some companies may store and use sensitive data in safer ways, but users do not have the ability to vet this. Even companies using better security practices can face hacks.

R Street is a think tank that stands for “free markets and limited, effective government”, so they will not say this, but privacy legislation would help protect users from these kinds of abuses. It was probably a bad idea for Tea to be collecting so much personal information in the first place. Yet this kind of data is routinely used in some industries, and it is unrealistic to expect individuals to figured out and monitor the privacy practices of individual services. Policies that limit data collection and retention, along with public auditing or other compliance-checking methods, can allow us to be more confident and provide remedies for bad practices and misuse.

Substack Sent a Push Alert Promoting a Nazi Blog ⇥ usermag.co

Taylor Lorenz, User Mag:

Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a “White homeland.”

[…]

Substack said that the alert was issued by mistake. “We discovered an error that caused some people to receive push notifications they should never have received,” a spokesperson told User Mag. “In some cases, these notifications were extremely offensive or disturbing. This was a serious error, and we apologize for the distress it caused. We have taken the relevant system offline, diagnosed the issue, and are making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

One way for a social media platform administrator to reduce the likelihood people will erroneously receive notifications for Nazi stuff is by disallowing Nazi stuff on their social media platform. Sadly, I do not think that is the change Substack is committing to making.

That Pew Report Is Sure Looking Like a Foundational Text, Unfortunately ⇥ bbc.com

Thomas Germain, BBC News, covered the Pew report about the relationship between Google’s A.I. Overviews and click-through traffic:

Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” [Pew’s Aaron] Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% to 70% depending on what people are Googling. [Amisive’s Lily] Ray says she’s personally seen this in data from hundreds of websites.

But Google tells the BBC you should disregard this, because it’s bad research, biased data and meaningless anecdotes. The company says web traffic fluctuates for many reasons, and AI Overviews link to a wider variety of sources and create new ways to discover websites. Google’s spokesperson says the clicks from AI answers are also higher quality because people spend more time on the sites they visit.

I will continue to harp on this report. I think it is going to be foundational, yet I do not think it is robust enough to sustain the number of articles and conclusions that will be derived from it. The same is also true of a lot of third-party research into Google’s search engine. A decline of 30% in click-through rates is significant, but 70% is catastrophic. It is hard to see how these are both valid results.

This research is also more complex than these headline findings. Take the report showing a 70% reduction in click-through rates when an A.I. Overview is present. That is true — it is a reduction from 2.94% to 0.84% — but the next finding is a near-doubling of the click-through rate when a link is a source in the A.I. Overview compared to if it is not. Not only does this appear to contradict Pew’s findings, it is also described as an “incremental” change despite click-through figures being as similarly small as the previous finding.

The overall trend seems undeniable, however — A.I. Overviews are generally clobbering search referral traffic. Publishers are aware of ebbs and flows in search referral traffic. A.I. Overviews are not having that kind of middling effect. I appreciate Germain’s yadda-yadda framing of Google’s response here; if it wishes to dispute the overall trend, Google should provide evidence.

Germain:

Ironically, Google’s own AI disagrees with its PR department. If you ask Google Gemini, it says AI Overviews hurt websites. […]

I get the joke but I wish it was not included in this article because it plays into myths of how generative A.I. works. Germain is smart enough to know Gemini is just parroting news articles about the subject. And if it did not, it would be deeply suspicious! If questions to Gemini only showed Google P.R.-approved responses, that would be much worse.

Subreddits with War Media Are Caught in the U.K. Age Verification Law ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Several Reddit communities dedicated to sharing news and media from conflicts around the world now require users in the UK to submit a photo ID or selfie in order to prove they are old enough to view “mature” content. The new age verification system is a result of the recently enacted Online Safety Act in the UK, which aims to protect children from certain types of content and hold platforms like Reddit accountable if they don’t.

One formative memory from my childhood is when I saw nightly news broadcasts about the Bosnian war. I was too young to understand it, though I remember seeing gruesome footage of bloodied bodies. I have considered that maybe this is something I should not have been exposed to, and I have also considered it is how I have grown up having a glimpse of the horrors. However, a mix of broadcast standards and my parents’ decisions is how I saw that footage. None of that changes in the post-verification era. Broadcasters will continue to show this footage, and children and teenagers will continue to see it in their homes. But they will be carded when they try to learn more on the web.

Contrary to the beliefs of one moderator of one of these subreddits, this does not seem to be motivated by burying evidence of the atrocities of war. This is the predictable overreach of Reddit choosing to require age verification to view any “not safe for work” subreddit, because of course Reddit is not going to be sensitive to context. It is not right; it is what is least expensive because it requires little additional moderation or underlying technical changes. Reddit could implement different types of NSFW labelling, but that also increases its risk of legal liability if something is improperly labelled.

The Unknown Effect of Google A.I. Overviews on Search Traffic

Pew Research Centre made headlines this week when it released a report on the effects of Google’s A.I. Overviews on user behaviour. It provided apparent evidence searchers do not explore much beyond the summary when presented with one. This caused understandable alarm among journalists who focused on two stats in particular: a reduction from 15% of searches which resulted in a result being clicked to just 8% when an A.I. Overview was shown, and finding that just 1% of searches with an Overview resulted in a click on a citation in that summary.

Beatrice Nolan, of Fortune, said this was evidence A.I. was “eating search”. Thomas Claburn, of the Register, said they were “killing the web”, and Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, says Google’s push to boost A.I. “will end the flow of all that traffic almost completely and destroy the business of countless blogs and news sites in the process”. In addition to the aforementioned stats, Ryan Whitwam, of Ars Technica, also noted Pew found “Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an A.I. Overview” than if they do not. It is, indeed, worrisome.

Pew’s is not the only research finding a negative impact on search traffic to publishers thanks to Google’s A.I. search efforts. Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan of Ahrefs published, earlier this year, the results of anonymized and aggregated Google Search Console data finding a 34.5% drop in click-through rate when A.I. Overviews were present. This is lower than the 47% drop found by Pew, but still a massive amount.

Ahrefs gives two main explanations for this decline in click-through traffic. First, and most obviously, these Overviews present as though they answer a query without needing to visit any other pages. Second, they push results further down the page. On a phone, an Overview may occupy the whole height of the display, as shown in Google’s many examples. Either one of these could be affecting whether users are clicking through to more stuff.

So we have two different reports showing, rather predictably, that Google’s A.I. Overviews kneecap click rates on search listings. But these findings are complicated by the various other boxes Google might show on a results page, none of which are what Google calls an “A.I.” feature. There are a slew of Rich Result types — event information, business listings, videos, and plenty more. There are Rich Answers for when you ask a general knowledge question. There are Featured Snippets that extract and highlight information from a specific page. These “zero-click” features all look and behave similarly to A.I. Overviews. They all try to answer a user’s question immediately. They all push organic results further down the page. So what is different about results with an A.I. twist?

Part of the problem is with methodology. That deja vu you are experiencing is because I wrote about this earlier this week, but I wanted to reiterate and expand upon that. The way Pew and Ahrefs collected the data for measuring click-through rates differs considerably. Pew, via Ipsos KnowledgePanel, collected browsing data from 900 U.S. adults. Researchers then used a selection of keywords to identify search result pages with A.I. Overviews. Ahrefs, on the other hand, relied on data directly from Google Search Console automatically provided by users who connected it to the company’s search optimization software. Ahrefs compared data collected in March 2024, pre-A.I. rollout, against that from March 2025 after Google made A.I. Overviews more present in search results.

In both reports, there is no effort made to distinguish between searches with A.I. Overviews present and those with the older search features mentioned above, and that would impact average click-through rates. Since Featured Snippets rolled out, for example, they have been considered the new first position in results and, unlike A.I. Overviews in the findings of Pew and Ahref, they can drive a lot of traffic. Search optimization studies are pretty inconsistent, finding Featured Snippets on between 11%, according to Stat, and up to 80% according to Ahrefs.

But the difference is even harder to research than it seems because A.I. Overviews do not necessarily replace Featured Snippets, nor are they independent of each other. There are queries for which Overviews are displayed that had no such additional features before, there are queries where Featured Snippets are being replaced. Sometimes, the results page will show an A.I. Overview and a Featured Snippet. There does not seem to be a lot of good data to disentangle what effect each of these features has in this era. A study from Amisive from earlier this year found the combined display of Overviews and Snippets reduced click-through rates by 37%, but Amisive did not publish a full data set to permit further exploration.

But publishers do seem to be feeling the effects of A.I. on traffic from Google’s search engine. The Wall Street Journal, relying on data from Similarweb, reported a precipitous drop in search traffic to mainstream news sources like Business Insider and the Washington Post from 2022 to 2025. Similarweb said the New York Times’ share of traffic coming from search fell from 44% to 36.5% in that time. Interestingly, Similarweb’s data did not show a similar effect for the Journal itself, reporting a five-point increase in the share of traffic derived from search over the same period.

The quality of Similarweb’s data is, I think, questionable. It would be better if we had access to a large-scale first-party source. Luckily, the United States Government operates proprietary analytics software with open access. Though it is not used on all U.S. federal government websites, its data set is both general-purpose — albeit U.S.-focused — and huge: 1.55 billion sessions in the last thirty days. As of writing, 44.1% of traffic in the current calendar year is from organic Google searches, down from 46.4% in the previous calendar year. That is not the steep decline found by Similarweb, but it is a decline nevertheless — enough to drop organic Google search traffic behind direct traffic. I also imagine Google’s A.I. Overviews impact different types of websites differently; the research from Ahrefs and Amisive seems to back this up.

Google has, naturally, disputed the results of Pew’s research. In an extended comment to Search Engine Journal, the company said Pew “use[d] a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic”, adding “[we] have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic”. What Google sees as flaws in Pew’s methodology is not disclosed, nor does the company provide any numbers to support its side of the story. Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has even claimed A.I. Overviews are better for referral traffic than links outside Overviews — but, again, has never provided evidence.

Intuitively, it makes sense to me that A.I. Overviews are going to have a negative impact on click-through rates, because that is kind of the whole point. The amount of information being provided to users on the results page increases while the source of that information is minimized. It also seems like the popular data sources for A.I. Overviews are of mixed quality; according to a Semrush study, Quora is the most popular citation, while Reddit is the second-most popular.

I find all of these studies frustrating and it is not necessarily the fault of the firms conducting them. Try as hard as the search optimization industry has, we still do not have terrifically reliable ways of measuring the impact each new Google feature has on organic search traffic. The party in the best possible position to demystify this — Google — tends to be extremely secretive on the grounds it does not want people gaming its systems. Also, given the vast disconnect between the limited amount Google is saying and the findings of researchers, I am not sure how much I trust its word.

It is possible we cannot know exactly how much of an effect A.I. Overviews will have on search trafic, let alone that of “answer engines” like Perplexity. The best thing any publisher can do at this point is to assume the mutual benefits are going away — and not just in search. Between Google’s legal problems and it fundamentally reshaping how people discover things in search, one has to wonder how it will evolve its advertising business. Publishers have already been prioritizing direct relationships with readers. What about advertisers, too? Even with the unknown future of A.I. technologies, it seems like it would be advantageous to stop relying so heavily on Google.

In Alberta and Ontario, Provincial Governments Are Interfering With City Cycling Lanes ⇥ sprawlcalgary.com

Vjosa Isai, New York Times:

Some of the most popular bike lanes were making Toronto’s notorious traffic worse, according to the provincial government. So Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, passed a law to rip out 14 miles of the lanes from three major streets that serve the core of the city.

Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, arrived for her first day in office two years ago riding a bike. She was not pleased with the law, arguing that the city had sole discretion to decide street rules.

Jeremy Klaszus, the Sprawl:

Is Calgary city hall out of control in building new bike lanes or negligent in building too few?

Opinions abound. But with Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen talking about pausing new bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton (he’s meeting with Mayor Jyoti Gondek about this July 30), it’s worth looking at what city hall has and hasn’t done on the cycling file.

I commute and do a fair slice of my regular errands by bike, and it is clear to me that seemingly few people debating this issue actually ride these lanes. Bike lanes on city streets have always struck me as a compromised version of dedicated cycling infrastructure, albeit made necessary by an insufficient desire to radically alter the structure of our roadway network. Everything — the scale of the lanes, the banking of the road surface, the timing of the lights — is designed for cars, not bikes.

But it is what we have, and it is not as though the provincial governments in Alberta and Ontario are seriously considering investment in better infrastructure. They simply do not treat cycling seriously as a mode of transportation. Even at a municipal level, one councillor — who represents an area nowhere near the city’s centre — is advocating for the removal of a track on a quiet street, half of which is pedestrianized. This is not the behaviour of people who are just trying to balance different modes of transportation.

Klaszus:

Meanwhile independent mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who was critical of expanding the downtown cycle track network when he was a councillor, has proposed tying capital transportation dollars to mode usage.

“Up until now we’ve had the sort of cars versus bikes debate and I think the way to break that logjam is to just acknowledge that every single form of transportation is legitimate,” Farkas said. “When we tie funding to usage, we take the guesswork and the gamesmanship out of it.”

This is a terrible idea. Without disproportionately high investment, cycle tracks will not be adequately built out and maintained and, consequently, people will not use them. This proposal would be a death spiral. Cycling can be a safe, practical, and commonplace means of commuting, if only we want it to be. We can decide to do that as a city, if not for the meddling of our provincial government.

The U.K. Begins Enforcing Age Verification ⇥ bbc.com

Liv McMahon and Andrew Rogers, BBC News:

Around 6,000 sites allowing porn in the UK will start checking if users are over 18 on Friday, according to the media regulator Ofcom.

Dame Melanie Dawes, its chief executive, told the BBC “we are starting to see not just words but action from the technology industry” to improve child safety online.

She told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that “no other country had pulled off” such measures, nor gained commitments from so many platforms, including Elon Musk’s X, around age verification.

It is remarkable that one of the first large-scale laws of this type happened on the web before it hit smartphone apps. Perhaps that is because both the App Store and Play Store have rules prohibiting pornography. The web has so far only had voluntary guidelines and minimal verification. In the U.K., that has now changed.

This article is headlined “Around 6,000 Porn Sites Start Checking Ages in U.K.”, yet in this — the first paragraph — the reporters acknowledge these are “sites allowing porn” not “porn sites”. This might sound like I am splitting hairs, but this figure seems to include some extremely large non-porn websites too:

Ofcom said on Thursday that more platforms, including Discord, X (formerly Twitter), social media app Bluesky and dating app Grindr, had agreed to bring in age checks.

The regulator had already received commitments from sites such as Pornhub – the UK’s most visited porn website – and social media platform Reddit.

When we are talking about large platforms like Discord and Reddit, there is a meaningful difference between describing them as “porn sites” and “sites allowing porn”.

Apps for Bluesky, Discord, Grindr, Reddit, and X are all available on the App Store, where they all have “16+” ratings, and the Play Store, where they have a “Mature 17+” rating with the exception of Discord’s “Teen” rating. These platforms are in a position to provide privacy-protecting age gating and, I think, they ought to do so with APIs also available to third-party stores.

The age verification mandated by this British law, however, is worrisome, especially if it becomes a model for similar laws elsewhere. The process may be done by a third-party service and can require sensitive information. These services may be specialized, meaning they may have better security and privacy protections, but it still means handing over identification to some service a user probably does not recognize. What is a “Yoti” anyway? And, because website operators are liable if they do not adequately protect youth, they may choose to take broader measures — just in case. For example, the law requires age verification for “material that promotes or encourages suicide, self-harm and eating disorders”. Sounds reasonable, but it also means online support groups could be age-restricted as a precautionary measure by their administrators. Perhaps that is reasonable; perhaps young people should only participate in professional support groups. But it is a notable compromise.

Nevertheless, I think the justification behind this policy is fair and deserved. There are apps and parts of the web where children should not be able to participate. I do not even mind the presence of a third-party in the verification chain — many Canadian government services include the option of logging in with a bank or credit union account, and it works quite well. But there are enough problems with this law that I hope it is not seen by other governments — including my own — as a good foundation, because it is not.

Artists Are Removing Music From Spotify Due to CEO Daniel Ek’s ‘Investment in A.I. War Drones’ ⇥ nme.com

Tim Bradshaw and Ivan Levingston, Financial Times:

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s investment company is leading a €600mn funding round in Helsing, valuing the German defence tech group at €12bn and making it one of Europe’s most valuable start-ups.

The deal comes as the Munich-based start-up is expanding from its origins in artificial intelligence software to produce its own drones, aircraft and submarines.

Laura Molloy, NME:

Xiu Xiu have announced that they are in the process of removing their music from Spotify, over CEO Daniel Ek’s “investment in AI war drones”.

[…]

It comes after Deerhoof also recently pulled their catalogue from the platform for the same reason, stating: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech,” Deerhoof said in a statement.

Financial relationships between the music industry and arms suppliers has been documented before, but it was more of a hop-skip-and-jump away. Ek’s investment is pretty direct. A Spotify subscription boosts his net worth, which he puts into his fund, which gives that money to an drone company he helps oversee.

Update: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has also removed its music from Spotify.

Google A.I. Summaries and Search Traffic ⇥ pewresearch.org

Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, Pew Research Center:

Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.

I looked through this article and the methodology to see how this survey came together, since it seems to me the real question is if A.I. summaries are more or less damaging to search traffic than older features like snippets.

As far as I can figure out, the way Pew did this survey is that it looked for mentions of A.I. among users who consented to having their web browsing data tracked, and then categorized that traffic depending on whether it was a news article about A.I. or an A.I. feature being used. Any Google data without an A.I. summary was, as far as I can see, categorized as not containing an A.I. summary. But this latter category amounted to 82% of all Google searches, and there does not appear to be any differentiation in what features were shown for those. Some may have snippets; others may have some other “zero-click” feature. Some may have no such features at all. Lumping all those together makes it impossible to tell what impact A.I. summaries are having on search compared to Google’s previous attempts to keep users in its bubble.

This survey does a good job of showing how irrelevant the source links are in Google A.I. summaries to search traffic. Much like the citations at the end of a book, they serve as an indicator of something being referenced, but there is no expectation anyone will actually read it to confirm whether the information is accurate. There was such a citation to a Microsoft article ostensibly containing an Excel feature Google made up. Unlike citations in a book, Google’s A.I. summaries are entirely the product of a machine built by people who have only some idea of the output.

Adam Aaronson Drank Every IBA Cocktail ⇥ aaronson.org

Adam Aaronson:

As of 2025, there are 102 IBA official cocktails, and as of July 12, 2025, I’ve had every one of them.

The journey has taken me to some interesting places, and now that it’s done, I have a little story to tell for each cocktail. I’m not gonna tell you all 102 stories, but I do want to debrief the experience. Drinking all 102 cocktails turned out to be unexpectedly tricky, and for reasons you’ll soon understand, I might be one of the first people in the world to do it.

Far from the first, as Aaronson notes later. If you are into cocktails, this looks like quite the experience. If the cocktail is truly a U.S. invention, it is among the finest things contributed by the country, along with Reese’s cups. Which are, I guess, a chocolate cocktail of sorts.

Aaronson put together a table “based on name recognition and ingredient availability”. It is pretty close to my own reactions as I read the piece — never heard of an Illegal but it sounds great — though I was surprised to see the White Lady in the “Obscure” row. It is a personal favourite, though I rarely order it as I typically have the ingredients on hand. For an excellent twist, try it with an Earl Grey gin.

Fixing ‘Optimize Storage’ ⇥ mjtsai.com

Ryan Jones in a thread on X (mirrored):

How to Clear Local iMessage Cache

- Settings > Name > iCloud > Messages > turn off Messages in the Cloud. Follow scary prompts.

- Messages > Settings > Apple Account > Sign Out. Follow scary prompts.

- Go to /Library/Messages and delete everything

- Empty trash

- Now you have nothing iMessage local

- Just reactive iMessage in the Cloud, and sync

Friendly reminder Optimize Storage was introduced in… iOS 8.1😑

Obviously, at your own risk.

Via Michael Tsai:

I think both Photos and Messages should have settings to specify the number of GB to cache locally.

I would like something similar, but I also do not understand why Messages — in particular — behaves like it does. As far as I can tell, my Messages cache on my iMac is a full copy of Messages in my iCloud account. It is not as though Apple is treating the cloud portion as merely a syncing solution, as it used to do with something like My Photo Stream, so it is not necessarily saving space in either my iCloud account or on my devices. I would like the option to store a full copy of my Messages history on my Mac, yes, but I also think it should more aggressively purge on-device copies. Is that not a key advantage of the cloud — that I do not need to keep everything on-disk?

Apple Releases Public Betas for Its ‘26’ Operating Systems ⇥ sixcolors.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

I have been using the iOS 26 beta since WWDC, and the MacOS Tahoe beta for a couple of weeks. Though I have been getting better battery life than I had expected, I am finding enough bugs and problems that I would recommend against participating in the public beta builds, at least for one or two more versions.

However, if you have a spare Mac or are comfortable setting up a dual-booting situation — and you like doing Apple’s quality assurance without pay — please try MacOS Tahoe and report as much feedback as you can.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The result of this feels more like a work in progress than a finished design, and since this is a beta, that’s fair enough. But I get the sense that this really is a design that’s been thoroughly considered for iPhones, is similar enough on the iPad to be in the ballpark, but that has not really been thought through on the Mac. At least, through the first few developer beta releases, there are signs that Apple is making progress adapting this design to the Mac. I hope it continues, because it’s still in a state of disrepair.

My experience has mirrored this almost exactly. There is a lot to like in the technical and feature updates in Tahoe, but the U.I. changes are disappointing. Even with Reduce Transparency switched on, I find myself distracted by elements with poor contrast and clunky-looking toolbars. Tabs look bizarre.

I am not an outright hater; there are many places where I find Liquid Glass joyful or, at least, interesting in iOS. I see what Apple is going for even in places where I think other choices would have made sense. But the changes in MacOS Tahoe are worrisome knowing this is pretty close to what I will be living with for the next year or longer.

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched its first ever public beta for AirPods firmware, bringing forthcoming iOS 26 features to AirPods users ahead of their fall launch. Here’s everything new.

No Liquid Glass here.

The Great Canadian Rights Grab ⇥ jacobin.com

David Moscrop, Jacobin, on the phenomenal curtailing of civil liberties promised by Bill C-2:

As a thought experiment, we might ask whether Carney would be tabling his bill absent Trump’s trade threats — and it’s reasonable to think that he wouldn’t. Nor, likely, would he be spending billions more on the armed forces. Carney’s goal, above all, is to grow the Canadian economy, using state power to “catalyze” private sector investment and growth. A heavily securitized border and expanded surveillance capacity may serve that purpose — or may simply reflect a managerial logic in which institutional capacity is an end in itself, pursued without much democratic deliberation. He may believe in these tools as necessary to modern governance. But in either case, had Trump not upended the framework of free trade between Canada and the United States, there’s a good chance there would no border bill at all — or at least a far weaker one.

And this is an optimistic paragraph.

Iranian Brickwork Shows Us Better Architecture Is Possible ⇥ thenation.com

Kate Wagner, the Nation:

What makes this architecture so appealing to Western eyes, aside from its beauty, is its uniqueness. Architectural culture, especially in the United States, remains (with some exceptions) bound to either bloated, athletic forms and spectacle or the same dull residential minimalism it’s been shilling since the early 2000s. Practice in the field is fragmented, and there is no longer a cohesive creative or ideological movement to shape it in progressive or public-facing ways. Capital, meanwhile, pushes architectural labor to the brink and incentivizes cheapness and repetition, resulting in eyesore offices, identikit apartment buildings, and disposable single-family homes. This is merely one example of the disintegration of artistic culture writ large across all fields, as each of them enter their own crises of funding and structural decline.

It is endlessly disappointing to see new buildings in prime real estate with scant thought given to how they fit with their environment, their relationship to pedestrian traffic, or — seemingly — their aesthetics. New buildings are going in on two busy intersections not far from me and both look absolutely dreadful. In many cities, including mine, there are simply no standards or expectations that we should live in an environment built with much care. When I look at the work Wagner describes in this article — say, the Saadat Abad residential building — I see care.

Selfish Rounded Corners in MacOS Tahoe Preview ⇥ pxlnv.com

I have added a small update to my link last month regarding rounded corners and design fidelity. Here is the addition in full:

After using MacOS Tahoe, here is one area not mentioned by Oakley where I firmly disagree with the extreme corner radii in the system — multipage PDF documents in Preview. Each page, bafflingly, gets significant rounded corners, and there is no way to turn this off. At no zoom level does each page get its original squared corners. An awful and selfish design choice.

This is, admittedly, using the current developer beta build, so it may not reflect the final version. But, still, who steps back from updating a PDF document viewer in which each page is cut off at the corners and thinks yes, this is an improvement? I repeat: a selfish design choice prioritizing Apple’s goals over that of its users.

Podcasting’s Pivot to Video ⇥ nytimes.com

Joseph Bernstein, New York Times:

Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and the media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-quarters of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about a quarter who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, the president of Signal Hill, said that this split holds across age groups — it’s not simply driven by Gen Z and that younger generation’s supposed great appetite for video.

[…]

Still, this leaves everyone else — more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines “views” in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks “play” on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself.

Thirty seconds is an awful short time to be counted as a single view on these very long videos. At the very least, I think it should be calculated as a fraction of the length of any specific video.

This report (PDF) has a few things of note, anyhow, like this from the fifth page:

YouTube is not a walled garden of podcasts: 72% of weekly podcast consumers who have consumed podcasts on YouTube say they would switch platforms from YouTube if a podcast were to become available only on another platform. 51% of YouTube podcast consumers say they already have listened to the same podcasts they consume on YouTube in another place.

There is not another YouTube, so this indicates to me the video component is not actually important to many people, and that YouTube is not a great podcast client. It is, however, a great place for discovery — a centralized platform in the largely decentralized world of podcasting.

Bernstein:

Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video.

The advertising model of podcasts has long been a tough nut to crack. It is harder to participate in the same surveillance model as the rest of the web, even with the development of dynamically ad insertion. There is simply less tracking and less data available to advertisers and data brokers. This is a good thing. YouTube, being a Google platform, offers advertisers more of what they are used to.

Apple Intelligence News Summaries Are Back in the Fourth Beta Builds of Apple’s ’26 Operating Systems ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Upon installing the new update, users of Apple Intelligence-compatible devices will be asked to enable or disable three broad categories of notifications: those for “News & Entertainment” apps, for “Communication & Social” apps, and for all other apps. The operating systems will list sample apps based on what you currently have installed on your device.

All Apple Intelligence notification summaries continue to be listed as “beta,” but Apple’s main change here is a big red disclaimer when you enable News & Entertainment notification summaries, pointing out that “summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines.” The notifications also get a special “summarized by Apple Intelligence” caption to further distinguish them from regular, unadulterated notifications.

Apparently there are architectural changes to help with reliability, but the only way to know for certain if a generated summary is accurate is to read the original. Then again, there are plenty of cases where human-written headlines are contradicted by the story contained within.

Generated summaries are different — or at least they feel different to me — though it is difficult to articulate why. The best way I can describe it is that it is an interference layer between the source of data and its recipient. This is true for all machine-generated summaries which promise a glimpse of a much larger set of information, but without any accountability for their veracity. While summaries of message threads in Mail are often usable, I have rarely found them useful.

FT: U.K. Is ‘Seeking a Way Out’ Over iCloud End-to-End Encryption Backdoor, but ‘Has Not Backed Down’ ⇥ ft.com

The Financial Times today published an article by Anna Gross, Tim Bradshaw, and Lauren Fedor, in which the three paint a picture of a complex stalemate between investment interests and the U.K. government’s snooping desires:

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK’s demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data, two senior British officials have told the Financial Times.

The officials both said the Home Office, which ordered the tech giant in January to grant access to its most secure cloud storage system, would probably have to retreat in the face of pressure from senior leaders in Washington, including vice-president JD Vance.

The writers go on to describe the tension between U.K. and U.S. authorities, with sources telling them the U.K. definitely wants this capability, but feels the weight of the U.S. administration. Here are two things I think are true:

  1. The U.K. should not be demanding access to iCloud data end-to-end encrypted by Advanced Data Protection — and certainly not worldwide, as it wants. It is terrible on the merits, it will be misused, and it is ridiculous nobody can talk about it directly because of secrecy requirements.

  2. The U.S. continues to abuse its power in worrisome ways. There is no evidence this administration is objecting to the U.K. law on the merits of free speech, given how bad they are on speech in general. There is lots of reason to believe they are simply hostile to any attempts at regulating the massive technology companies that happen to come from the U.S. and reinforce its global power. It is not just the U.K.; the Canadian government pulled a fairly reasonable Digital Services Tax to placate this administration for similar reasons.

Bad faith rationale aside, the U.K. seems to be thinking about retreating from its backdoor efforts, though it has not yet made any moves to do so. Yet Ars Technica, which syndicates the occasional Times story, republished this article under the headline “UK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US”. That is not true — not yet, anyway.

And there is reason to be skeptical of the Times’ sourcing on these matters, too. In 2023, its reporters — including Gross, who also worked on this Advanced Data Protection story — were told the U.K. government would no longer demand the breaking of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps. This was only true in the sense the government no longer demanded impossible backdoors, only possible ones. This was not so much rescinding a demand as it was clarifying it.

Until the U.K. formally withdraws the technical capability notice served to Apple — and maybe Google, too — we should assume they are still pushing for a backdoor. And, because of the secrecy rules, if they do rescind it, it seems we will only find out in a leak to the Times or the BBC, without any official acknowledgement any of this took place.

The Trump Administration Was Lying About Antitrust Enforcement ⇥ techdirt.com

Last time I checked in on how the second Trump administration was going to approach the globally-relevant business of antitrust enforcement, I was cautiously optimistic. Some key trust-busting suits were filed under the first Trump administration and, while sloppy, there seemed to be seeds planted for a continuation of a more active FTC. I knew this administration would be catastrophic, and even my tiny speck of optimism was misplaced.

Josh Sisco, of Bloomberg, in a profile of FTC chair Andrew Ferguson:

His concerns, too, may also be resolved with more novel compromises. In May Ferguson launched an investigation into ad agencies, alleging that they colluded in politically motivated ad boycotts, a bugbear of conservative media and X.com owner Elon Musk in particular.

Shortly after, the FTC signed off on Omnicom Group’s $13.5 billion buyout of rival Interpublic, a tie-up that would create the world’s biggest ad agency. To secure the regulator’s approval, the two groups promised they wouldn’t engage in any such boycotts in the future, but made no economic concessions.

That deal may prove to be a template for the FTC under Ferguson. By focusing attention on the alleged ad boycotts and leaving the underlying businesses untouched, the terms appealed to the MAGA faithful and corporate interests.

Sisco can call this a “novel compromise” all he wants, but this is nothing more than a perverted gift. Under Khan, Ferguson also objected to the FTC’s involvement in regulating non-compete agreements, saying it was an overreach for the commission, but has used his power under the Trump administration to go after transgender care because of course he has.

Karl Bode, of Techdirt, has been keeping tabs on how they have been faring on matters of competition:

That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.

[…]

The only remaining remnants of Lina Khan’s antitrust legacy has been the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t killed several of her prominent antitrust cases against tech giants like Meta and Google. But again, this isn’t because Trump wants to genuinely rein in corporate power, it’s because he wants to maintain leverage over companies that control the flow of online information.

As I wrote over the weekend, this administration has kneecapped the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, one of the few checks on overreaches by the country’s federal government. All of these things have international implications. That board, for example, is responsible for the court that handles privacy complaints from Europeans. The merger of those two ad agencies means less competition worldwide. But Ferguson has affirmed the key conservative pillars of being supposed victims of the world around them and doing harm to trans people. That is his job, apparently. Being a trustbuster? Not so much.

French Data Under U.S. Firms Is Not Protected From U.S. Government Access ⇥ brusselssignal.eu

Anne-Laure Dufeal, Brussels Signal:

The [French] Senate report cited Microsoft France’s legal director, Anton Carniaux, as admitting the company could not guarantee that French data it hosted would not be handed over to foreign authorities.

“Carniaux … was asked by the [French Senate] commission to guarantee that French citizens’ data hosted by Microsoft would never be transmitted to foreign authorities without the agreement of the French authorities. He replied: ‘No, I can’t guarantee that,’” the report stated.

Luis Rijo, PPC Land:

The testimony contradicts years of Microsoft’s security assurances regarding European data hosting. Despite implementing encryption and technical safeguards, the company acknowledged that US legislation ultimately supersedes protective measures when federal agencies issue valid data requests.

[…]

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and other hyperscale providers operate under identical legal frameworks, potentially exposing European data to extraterritorial access. The testimony suggests widespread vulnerability in European digital infrastructure built on American technological foundations.

Ben Werdmuller:

Reliance on US services has become a point of vulnerability for everyone. This should be a concern regardless of American leadership; under the current administration, it’s become a frequent topic of conversation for security leaders both inside and outside of the country.

The U.S. set up a new court to handle European complaints, but it is under the umbrella of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board which currently has a single board member, who happens to be a Republican. That is because the other three members of the board — all Democrats — were told to leave after Donald Trump retook the presidency, thus making it non-functional. Is the court hearing cases? That is a good question; the whole thing is one big secret.

Billionaires Destroyed American News Media on Purpose ⇥ readtpa.com

Parker Molloy:

Think about where Stephen Colbert started. At Comedy Central, he played a character who parodied right-wing media manipulation. His whole schtick was pretending to be a Fox News-style propagandist who twisted facts, attacked critics, and defended power at all costs.

Twenty years later, he’s been silenced by actual media manipulation. Real billionaires wielding real power to protect their real financial interests.

The writers who created The Colbert Report couldn’t have scripted it better. Except this isn’t satire. It’s just what happens now when media companies need government approval for their deals.

Regardless of how much you like Colbert’s take on the Late Show — I do not care for it — the circumstances around its cancellation are suspicious and the implications are alarming. Were Colbert’s jokes truly cutting to the core of the Trump administration? I hardly think so. But it is nevertheless difficult not to see it as an olive branch for merger approval — an implied condition.

(Update: Anonymous sources swore up and down to the New York Times that this was purely a financial decision.)

Via Rusty Foster, who ties together a bunch of threads on this into the title thesis, “billionaires destroyed American news media on purpose”:

When I told my new friend that the American news media has been systematically and intentionally destroyed by a handful of billionaires, he asked an extremely reasonable question, which was: “but why?” And what makes this feel like a conspiracy is that there is no single answer to “why?” Sometimes it’s arrogance, sometimes it’s ideology, sometimes it’s purely money. Often it’s a messy combination of all three.

But if you really want to step back a bit, the reason why is that we have a socioeconomic system that concentrates nation-state level wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals, with virtually no checks on what they can choose to do with it. So if Larry Ellison wants to turn CBS News into Bari Weiss’s Free Press TV, or Jeff Bezos wants to make The Washington Post into an ideological subsidiary of the Cato Institute… what institutions of power will be left to disagree?

In related news, U.S. lawmakers voted to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. Conservatives in Canada are waging a similar campaign to stop funding the CBC, and I hope it fails.

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Apple Sues Jon Prosser and Michael Ramacciotti for a ‘Coordinated Scheme’ to Leak iOS 26 Redesign ⇥ macrumors.com

Jon Prosser’s many videos showing mockups of this year’s redesign on iOS were accurate. Very accurate, in fact — it was easy to surmise he had seen screenshots and videos of what it looked like in the real world. That part was not really in question. What would be, from Apple’s perspective, is if those demonstrations were obtained legitimately, and the company is now arguing they were not.

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple’s complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti’s friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik’s phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he “would be gone for an extended period.” Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.

Apple says Ramacciotti accessed Lipnik’s development iPhone and made a FaceTime call to Prosser, showing off iOS 26 running on the development iPhone, and that Prosser recorded the call with screen capture tools. Prosser then shared those videos with others and used them to make re-created renders of iOS 26 for his videos.

Prosser, for his part, says he “certainly did not ‘plot’ to access anyone’s phone and was unaware of the situation playing out”. He also tweeted what seems to be a Signal screenshot as — I guess — proof, but it is a brief segment of a conversation with only implied context. I am not sure it is a great idea for Prosser to keep talking about this in public or post screenshots of what appears to be a discussion with a source.

The complaint filed by Apple contains a little more information, including a screenshot of a partly-redacted April email tipping the company off. It appears it was sent to several people at Apple, judging by the amount of redactions in the “to” field, and it implicates three others in this leak, though their names are redacted. It also suggests Prosser was sloppy with protecting his source. Finally, the tipster claims someone “has leaked iOS information” before to a party with a redaction almost the same length as the third “involved” party. (Also, at least one of these redactions is trivial to guess if you line up the characters.)

Three days after this email was sent, Prosser published even more comprehensive renders of iOS 26, which were representative of the version shown at WWDC.

There are shades and echoes here of Apple’s 2004–05 lawsuits against several rumour sites — most notably Think Secret, and also Apple Insider and O’Grady’s PowerPage — and their unnamed sources. Despite working my PACER account from every angle, I cannot seem to find Apple’s original complaints.

However, they were summarized by Joseph M. Tartakoff, writing for the Harvard Crimson in 2005:

Apple’s lawsuit alleges that Think Secret is illegally soliciting Apple employees to violate confidentiality agreements and disclosing that information online without Apple’s permission.

Offering tipsters “complete anonymity,” the website contact page urges visitors to submit “news tips” and “insider information.”

Nearly three years later, the lawsuit was settled and Think Secret was shut down.

The details of Apple’s suit against Prosser and Ramacciotti allege the latter took advantage of a friendship. At what stage Prosser was made aware of this and to what extent, if any, he played in pushing Ramacciotti further seems to be a key question. Also, one has to wonder about the difference between what Prosser revealed and Mark Gurman’s obviously well-sourced repeated scoops.

I am also looking forward to Apple trying to explain how it has suffered “damage and loss in an amount to be proven at trial but, in any event, exceeding $5,000 aggregated over a one-year period”. This multitrillion-dollar company was financially injured by a few YouTube videos showing the redesign of its operating system? Sure, okay.

Does Google Maps Make Money? ⇥ placing.technology

Ingrid Burrington:

So even though there isn’t really a smoking gun here, I think it’s worth playing out what Google Geo being break-even or not-especially profitable means for both Google and for geospatial technology as a sector. Google Maps really warped public perception of the business of geospatial by making what had previously been consumer products totally free to consumers. Why do that — why undercut a revenue source — in order to maintain other revenue sources that aren’t necessarily profitable or certainly not hundreds of billions of dollars profitable?

Burrington’s attempts to answer this question reinforce how much of Google is unsustainable if it were fractured into standalone businesss. Maps, Docs, YouTube, Gemini — it seems unlikely any of these work on their own without the backing of Google’s monopolistic digital advertising business. That is, not just any digital ads, but specifically the vast control Google has over online advertising is, seemingly, what props up products that would otherwise struggle to remain afloat as they grew.

Airlines Are Using Generative A.I. to Set Individualized Prices ⇥ fortune.com

Bruce Parkinson, TravelPulse Canada, in June 2024:

The WestJet Group has partnered with Tel Aviv-based tech startup Fetcherr to implement what it is calling the industry’s first AI-driven pricing, inventory and publishing engine.

WestJet will implement Fetcherr’s ‘Large Market Model’ technology, described as a “market engine that understands market dynamics, precisely forecasts demand and market trends and generates the best market moves based on the predicted actions of all market variables.”

Alex Cruz, the vice-chair on WestJet’s board, is also on the board at Fletcherr.

Irina Ivanova, Fortune:

By the end of the year, Delta plans for 20% of its ticket prices to be individually determined using AI, president Glen Hauenstein told investors last week. Currently, about 3% of the airline’s flight prices are AI-determined, triple the portion from nine months ago.

Over time, the goal is to do away with static pricing altogether, Hauenstein explained during the company’s Investor Day in November.

North American airlines, including Delta and WestJet, are apparently doing just fine for customer satisfaction, which is surprising. Canada has two major airlines and, because I live west of Ontario, I have to deal with WestJet whenever I go pretty much anywhere. I expect only the basics and still find myself disappointed. But I guess their reputations have enough leeway to permit the kind of dynamic pricing future described with caution in science fiction novels. Or maybe our standards are simply too low.

By the way, in case you are unsure who this dynamic pricing benefits — you are not, but stick with me — it is the airlines. Fletcherr’s co-founder said at a conference last year that the company’s technology generated 10% additional revenue for participating airlines, considerably more than the 4–5% found by the less-sophisticated dynamic pricing examined in a 2022 working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research (PDF).

‘Marc Andreessen Is a Traitor’ ⇥ liberalcurrents.com

Natasha Tiku, Washington Post:

Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.

The messages the Post obtained were sent after Ben Smith of Semafor exposed other Andreessen group chats. Those chats, according to Smith, were described by current White House official and former Andreessen-Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan as “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion” — a frank acknowledgement of the power these rich guys have.

Adam Gurri, Liberal Currents:

Since “the Deal, with a capital D” had been broken, Andreesen and his cohorts had no choice but to throw their lot in with Trump, who now is making those dealbreakers pay the price. And it’s going swimmingly, from Andreesen’s point of view. He is no longer bound by the terms of “the Deal,” which required him to pay lip service to “all the fashionable and appropriate social causes” such as human rights and equal dignity.

To his dying day, Andreessen will surely believe that they are the traitors, that he was the one who was betrayed. But the only traitor is Andreessen himself.

Quibble with Gurri’s summary of Netscape’s task as “relatively easy” — Andreessen, Eric Bina, and others “created one piece of software that performed a simple task well enough to deliver to the market, and they successfully achieved mass adoption” is a notable effort but, to steelman Gurri’s argument, considerably less notable than the technical foundation on which it rested. But Andreessen is a quintessential example of pulling the ladder up now that he has reached the top. He got his — his education, his billions, his mansion — and, because he does not want more traffic in his neighbourhood, other people get screwed.

G/O Media Has Sold Off Just About All Its Sites Eighteen Months After Denying It Was Selling Off All Its Sites ⇥ defector.com

In January 2024, Mark Stenberg reported for Adweek that G/O Media was “shopping around its portfolio of editorial assets” — which normal people call “publications” or “websites” — “in hopes of securing buyers for individual titles”. Stenberg included a statement from G/O Media in which a representative said “[y]our reporting is largely incorrect”.

Jim Spanfeller, CEO of G/O Media, in an “epilogue” published earlier this month, just a year and a half later:

This week the sale of Kotaku to Keleops, the buyers of Gizmodo, was announced. Coming on the heels of Redbrick, a Canadian company, buying both Quartz as well as The Inventory, this leaves G/O Media with just The Root. And while The Root is a wonderful site and a very good business it is now abundantly clear that G/O Media is and has been working towards a full wind down.

No kidding?

I am a little worried for the Root, a publication that deserved better than being hollowed out, and will probably get unceremoniously offloaded to some other private equity firm to run it into the ground like its siblings. But it is the last remaining part of this group after the downfall of G/O was triggered by the company’s demand that Deadspin stick to sports.

That, with time, brought us Defector, where Samer Kalaf writes:

As Defector approaches its five-year anniversary in September, here’s a message for Jim Spanfeller: I’m glad that this still eats at you. You overplayed your hand, and everyone watched you destroy your already flimsy reputation. The unnecessary cost was that you hounded talented people out of their jobs, but many of them have gone on to thrive elsewhere. Meanwhile, what you did to a bunch of beloved publications will be the defining moment of your career, maybe even the defining moment of your parasitic life. I’d say that it’ll be the first line of your obituary, but let’s be honest: No one’s writing one of those for you.

Spanfeller’s hubris can take credit not only for Defector, but also the Autopian and Aftermath, launched by former writers from Jalopnik and Kotaku, respectively. Meanwhile, the Onion is in better hands and is still trying to buy Infowars. Spanfeller’s meddling may have ruined a lot of jobs, but at least his influence over a “future driven in in great part by digital content” — his words — is minimal.

On A.I. Video Watermarks ⇥ technologymagazine.com

I dropped something about the tiny watermarks used by Google and OpenAI in generated videos, and I wanted to expand on it:

[…] Surely this is a marvel of technical achievement. Google’s technology generates convincing video and synced audio to match. That is incredible. So, why not shout about it? Make that watermark bigger, I say, and make it say what it is — “A.I. generated by Google Veo”, or something similar.

I think I know why Google and OpenAI are not doing this, and I think you do as well. […]

Instead of leaving this hanging, let me answer why I think videos generated by Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora embed subtle visual watermarks instead of more obvious ones.

This is going to sound more cynical than I think it really is, but here goes: both Google and OpenAI are happy to remove that watermark for users of their most expensive paid plans, marketed to professionals who want to use A.I. in their work. Stories like the one I linked to basically serve as advertisements for these subscriptions, even though they are also illustrations of how the technology can be abused. Someone using A.I. in a professional workflow might be less likely to use it in this manner.

But the watermark needs to be small because otherwise people would be less likely to use these services. Even if it was not very obnoxious, it would feel like an advertisement to post videos generated by these tools if they contained a more honest disclaimer of their origins. Hence, the truly incredible feat of generating video and synced audio from a text prompt is buried and, therefore, only comes up when it is being used to further scams, fraud, hatred, or advertisement campaigns.

A Tedious Explanation of Paying for YouTube, Tediously

Well, they got me. I am now paying for YouTube.

For years, I have used an ad blocker only infrequently on YouTube partly because the ads used to be short and not too disruptive, but mostly because I feel bad for people who make videos for a living. There is basically no alternative to YouTube.

Text is small; I can take this website anywhere I want. I can make my writing as discoverable or as paywalled as I deem makes sense. The same is true, to varying degrees, for images and audio. If someone does not like how their podcast host is behaving, they can move their show. It is not easy but it is doable.

That is not the case for video — at least, not for independent makers in the safe-for-work realm. You might use any number of streaming apps for video from large studios, and perhaps smaller ones too, like Dropout and Nebula. But there is no second YouTube. Even though TikTok and Instagram provide sufficient competition in the mobile short-form format, there is simply nothing else for longer formats in landscape. Sites like Dailymotion are doing so poorly they are deleting videos if they have no activity for about a year. Video makers on alternative sites like Rumble still post clips or copies of their show to YouTube; despite their persistent whining about alleged censorship, their videos are not removed from YouTube, and they know it remains the best platform for discovery.

I began considering a YouTube Premium subscription a couple of years ago when the great Alec Watson mentioned that creators like him get a cut. Which, in hindsight, seems obvious: instead of ad revenue, they get a portion of subscription revenue. But this was and remains unmentioned in YouTube’s marketing. Call it parasocial, non-derogatory, but this is the most compelling argument for why I should pay for YouTube. I support several indies through Patreon, too, but this means I get to be even more supportive without making specific monthly commitments, and I get a better experience.

The experience, by the way, is what pushed me over the edge. Remember how I mentioned “ads used to be short and not too disruptive”? Over the past few years, YouTube has increased the default ad load and duration. Before I had Premium, I was seeing ads every one or two minutes in many videos where the uploader had not changed the ad settings. Being that intrusive is something only YouTube can do because, again, it has no competition.

The process for actually paying for YouTube was bizarrely difficult. Since I already have a music streaming subscription, the Premium Lite option was a good fit for me. However, Google simply would not geolocate me or my personal Google account to Canada, where the Lite option is available. There was no way to correct Google’s assumption about where I was located; it simply did not let me see the Lite registration page, even though the currency was displayed in Canadian dollars.

So I made a new account in my Google Workspace dashboard just for YouTube. It turns out this was a little complicated, too, as I now needed to enable various Google services to make this work: YouTube and Google Pay, at first, and more later.

Then I used Safari’s autocomplete to enter my credit card details, which is where things got real weird. My card’s expiration date and CSC were entered correctly. The number itself was, too, until the last digit, at which point it abruptly changed to something completely different in nearly the same format — instead of four groups of four numbers, it became three groups of four, followed by one group of three. A test card number also encountered the same issue. Today, about a week later, I cannot reproduce it, so it seems like it has been fixed — but, still, strange.

One unfortunate side effect of having a YouTube Premium membership is that I now need to sign into YouTube, which means I am also signed into all Google services. Because I am using a Workspace-type Google account, I have also needed to enabled additional services on the account, like Google Maps. I can work around this by using YouTube in a separate browser and configuring Safari to open all YouTube links in that other browser — but that is not a great experience. I have as much tracking turned off as I am able through Google’s settings, plus Safari has generally better tracking protection. And I really do use frequent site sponsor Magic Lasso Adblock, which truly helps me avoid a bunch of tracking I see in the wild; the difference is obvious in Web Inspector if I refresh a page without having Magic Lasso enabled.

I am still seeing the occasional ad on YouTube on videos where they should not be present. In general, however, this is a night-and-day experience. YouTube has successfully degraded its free experience to the point where it feels like the trial version of paid software. A single meaningful competitor would be a corrective force. Alas, only YouTube is YouTube, and that makes things worse for audiences and video makers alike.

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Elon Musk Gives Himself Another Handshake ⇥ wsj.com

Berber Jin and Becky Peterson, Wall Street Journal:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has agreed to invest $2 billion in his artificial-intelligence company xAI, investors close to the companies said, nearly half of the Grok chatbot maker’s recent equity raise.

This comes just a few months after xAI acquired X, one year after Musk shifted a bunch of Tesla-bound Nvidia GPUs to xAI, and just a few years after he used staff from Tesla to work on Twitter. So, to recap: he has moved people and resources from a publicly traded company to a privately owned one — twice — has used funds from one of his privately owned companies to buy another one of his privately owned companies, and is now using one of his publicly traded privately owned companies to give billions of dollars to (another) one of his privately owned ones.

(Update: SpaceX is privately owned, not publicly traded. Thank you, Matt.)

This feels wrong. This feels like a crime. I am not saying a crime was committed, nor do I know what laws may possibly have been broken here. But it certainly has a flavour of something that must — or, at least, should be — illegal. At the very least, it cannot be helping convince E.U. regulators that Musk’s businesses are, indeed, separate entities.

The Apple Style Guide Game Show ⇥ youtube.com

Via Myke Hurley, who also serves as host, comes the hot (?) new game show about Apple’s style guide. I thought this was really well done and, also, appropriately absurd. I did not keep track of my own score, but I cannot imagine I did very well after the first round.

One of the peculiarities of the style guide (PDF), comprehensive as it is, is when you stumble across something that is not defined. I have never been able to figure out what to call the bar across the bottom of iOS since the iPhone X, something I again realized when I linked to Craig Grannell’s piece this week. In the official “Designing for iPhone X” video, Apple’s Mike Stern simply calls it “an indicator”. In the iPhone user guide, it is not even given a name; users are simply told to “swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen” to go to the Home screen. “Home indicator” is what Grannell called it, and I have also seen people refer to it as the “Home bar”. But I am not sure it has an official term.

Racist Job Hunter Is Actually an A.I. Ad for A.I. Recruitement Software ⇥ cbc.ca

David Michael Lamb, Ashley Fraser, and Andrew Kitchen, CBC News:

Most of the videos feature what looks like a white man in his 20s named “Josh,” who speaks to the camera and makes racially charged statements about immigrants and their role in the job market. In fact, “Josh” is created by AI and doesn’t exist.

[…]

It’s part of a trend known as “fake-fluencing.” That’s when companies create fake personas with AI in order to make it look like a real person is endorsing a product or service. The company in this case is Nexa, an AI firm that develops software that other companies can use to recruit new hires. Some of the videos feature Nexa logos in the scene. The company’s founder and CEO Divy Nayyar calls that a “subconscious placement” of advertising.

These videos are not massively popular on TikTok, so I am not sure how effective this is as an advertisement for this company. Perhaps this story is the marketing they were hoping to get. That seems desperate.

In any case, the videos still had the tiny Google Veo watermark in the lower-right corner, and that got me thinking: why are these A.I. video generators being so coy about the origins of their products? Surely this is a marvel of technical achievement. Google’s technology generates convincing video and synced audio to match. That is incredible. So, why not shout about it? Make that watermark bigger, I say, and make it say what it is — “A.I. generated by Google Veo”, or something similar.

I think I know why Google and OpenAI are not doing this, and I think you do as well. In any other industry, hiding or masking the origins of a product raises suspicions. When a clothing company does not want to talk about their factories, we understand why that is a problem. It is the same thing here. Traceability matters in physical goods and digital ones, too.

Oh, and I doubt anyone is calling this trend “fake-fluencing”.

U.S. Tech Giants Face Pressure Over Data Sovereignty ⇥ restofworld.org

Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of World:

Developing nations are challenging Big Tech’s decades-long hold on global data by demanding that their citizens’ information be stored locally. The move is driven by the realization that countries have been giving away their most valuable resource for tech giants to build a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

[…]

South Africa is the only African country where Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have built their own data centers, adding to a market valued at $2.28 billion in 2023, according to market research firm Arizton Advisory & Intelligence. […]

It is difficult for me to believe each of the two-hundred-ish worldwide states will have an entirely localized data centre, even for just the named giants. Also, a requirement for local data storage may be a roadblock for new contenders. But the U.S. has repeatedly blown up any trust the world may have had in allowing it to steward all our data, so it is unsurprising to see moves in the direction of more sovereignty. Sure makes the internet feel less connected than it used to be, though.

Canada Should Build Public Cloud Infrastructure Rather Than Relying on U.S. Tech Giants ⇥ policyalternatives.ca

Paris Marx, in an article for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think tank:

As [Prime Minister Mark] Carney looks to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States, we can’t ignore the extent of our technological dependence — and the cloud is a great place to start. Carney’s statement during the election suggested he would look to Canadian companies to supply more of the computation and storage needs of the federal government, but he should be far more ambitious.

Instead of simply encouraging the buildout of a private Canadian cloud, the government should invest in the expansion of a public cloud — built and run by a Crown corporation with public financing to serve government needs, but potentially to expand beyond that too. The government already has data centres of its own, but in recent decades it’s more often looked to the private sector to supply more of its computational needs instead of developing in-house capacities as it did with older forms of information technology.

This would be a hard sell to the public, but it is a very good idea; similarly, we should not cede our physical communications system to private businesses. This seems unlikely under Carney, who is too busy embracing neoliberal fiscal positions to take on such a bold project, but it is the kind of big idea we need to counter U.S. tech dependence.

Grok Shows How Centralized Tech Can Be Manipulated ⇥ techdirt.com

Mike Masnick, Techdirt, reacting to Grok’s Nazi turn:

We need to take back control over the tools that we use.

Especially these days, as so many people have started (dangerously) treating AI tools as “objective” sources of truth, people need to understand that they are all subject to biases. Some of these biases are in their training data. Some are in their weights. And some are, as is now quite clear, directly in their system prompts.

The problem isn’t just bias — it’s whose bias gets embedded in the system. When a centralized AI reflects the worldview of tech billionaires rather than the diverse perspectives of its users, we’re not getting artificial intelligence. We’re getting artificial ideology.

I am half compelled by this argument, and half concerned. I obviously believe we should be skeptical of how much trust we place in corporations. After all, they have given us ample reason to be suspicious of them.

Even before it was “X”, Twitter did not have the best reputation for quality discussion. And then it was bought by Elon Musk. I still do not believe there is sufficient evidence for bias in users’ feeds during the recent U.S. presidential election, but the anti-“political correctness” written into Grok is a plainly obvious problem. Even so, a new version of Grok was launched this week, which consults Musk’s tweets when it gets stuck on a query. All of this should undermine the little bit of trust anyone might have left in X and xAI.

A company with a much better reputation, historically, is Google. Even though it has faced decades of scrutiny and questions about its secret website rankings, it has generally gotten things more right than not. To be clear, I can point to dozens of times when it has been bad at search — especially in the last five years — but it remains what most people think of when they think of searching the web. Yet, because it feels to some like A.I. works like magic, that reputation is on the line with good criticisms and very dumb ones. The Attorney General of Missouri — the state that nearly prosecuted a journalist for viewing the source of a website — is investigating Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI for being insufficiently supportive of the president’s record on Israel–U.S. relations. The Attorney General approvingly cites Missouri v. Biden, which the state lost.

Yet, even with all this in mind, we need to be able to trust institutions to some extent. This is the part of me concerned about Masnick’s piece. I think it is a great suggestion that we should control our own tools, where anyone can “choose your own values, your own sources, and your own filters”. However, most people are unlikely to do these things. Most of us will probably use something from some big company we do not really trust, but it is what ships with the system or is built into the apps we use most, or whatever. We need to ensure the areas where we have little control are trustworthy, too.

What that probably means is some kind of oversight, akin to what we have for other areas of little control. This is how we have some trust in the water we drink, the air we breathe, the medicine we take, and the planes we fly in. Consumer protection laws give us something to stand on when we are taken advantage of. Yes, there are places where this is done better than others, and I think we should learn from them instead of throwing up our hands and pretending this problem will be solved on an individual basis. To be clear, I am not reading Masnick’s writing as some kind of libertarian fantasy or an anti-regulation screed, nor do I interpret that in Alex Komoroske’s manifesto either. But I also believe there should be some regulation because we need to be realistic about the practical limitations of how much time and effort people will invest into controlling their experience.

Columbia University Applicant Data Stolen in Politically Motivated Attack ⇥ theverge.com

Cameron Fozi, Bloomberg:

Personal information about Columbia University students and applicants — including whether they were accepted or rejected by the school — has been stolen, according to a Bloomberg News review of data provided by a person who claimed to have hacked the school in June.

[…]

The alleged hacker, speaking via text and claiming to work alone, said they sought to acquire information about university applications that would suggest a continuation of affirmative action policies in Columbia’s admissions, following a 2023 Supreme Court decision that effectively barred the practice. The Columbia official said the school’s admissions processes are compliant with the Supreme Court decision.

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

And yet, there has been precious little reporting on the Columbia hack. Wired hasn’t covered it, and, until this story, neither has The Verge. Nor have The Chronicle of Higher Education, CyberScoop, 404 Media, TechCrunch, or Krebs on Security. These — including The Verge — are small to medium-size entities, and there’s any number of possible reasons why they didn’t pick it up. (On our end, it was partly because we were short-staffed during a national holiday, and partly because we didn’t immediately piece together how extraordinary this particular hack is.) But coverage at the much bigger, well-resourced institutions is also scanty. The Wall Street Journal passed on the story. Reuters has a brief on the initial outage; AP has a short write-up as well, which The Washington Post ran as part of their syndication deal.

The most extensive reporting comes from Bloomberg and The New York Times.

It is remarkable how little — and, from the Times in particular, how poor — coverage is of this attack. According to Fozi, the same person has claimed responsibility for two other politically motivated university data breaches. That is an interesting story.

Grok is Made Nazi ⇥ gizmodo.com

Matt Novak, Gizmodo:

Elon Musk recently promised to “fix” his AI chatbot Grok after it gave some answers that he thought were too liberal. But it seems Musk cranked up the far-right extremism dial with this last update, as Grok is now parroting Nazi talking points about Jews. In fact, Grok approvingly invoked the name of Adolf Hitler and seemed to suggest a second Holocaust was needed in tweets on Tuesday.

Bruna Horvath, NBC News:

In the same post, xAI said it would begin publishing Grok system prompts on GitHub so users could see when the company makes changes to the chatbot’s prompts. Under changes that have been made in the past day, the chatbot has been instructed that its responses “should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect,” as well as to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased.”

In her exit post today, Linda Yaccarino praised xAI as a “new chapter” for X, which is one way of putting it.

Update: After some thought, I changed the title of this post from “Grok Goes Nazi” to “Grok is Made Nazi”. The former is too passive, as though it decided on its own to become Nazi. The latter is closer to the truth: some person or people made Grok far more likely to respond with hateful and dehumanizing language. It was instructed to be okay with being “politically incorrect”. I regret my original phrasing.

Linda Yaccarino Steps Down As X CEO ⇥ axios.com

Linda Yaccarino:

After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of 𝕏.

Sara Fischer, Axios:

Once the ultimate cheerleader for Madison Avenue, Yaccarino’s relationship with the advertising community shifted when she became CEO of X, then Twitter.

Under Yaccarino, X waged a high-profile lawsuit against a major advertising industry coalition and its members, alleging the group abused its influence over marketers and ad agencies to discriminate unfairly against X, prompting an ad boycott.

I have never gotten a clear sense of whether Yaccarino is a true believer in the Musk vision for X, or simply an opportunist. After so many years in the advertising industry, it is surprising to see what looks like a heel turn to run an ad-supported company so antagonistic toward advertisers. Yet the tense relationship and this lawsuit have been a blueprint for the current U.S. administration. What a legacy.

On the other hand, if Yaccarino was regularly at odds with the owner of X, I am looking forward to the inevitable tell-all book.

The Quiet Exit of the Home Indicator in iOS and iPadOS 26 ⇥ reverttosaved.com

Craig Grannell:

In the ’26’ dev betas, Apple hasn’t provided an off switch in Settings [for the Home indicator], but it has introduced the next best thing. Actually, it’s arguably created something better. When you switch to an app, the Home indicator now elegantly fades. Further interaction with the app doesn’t make it reappear. Instead, you have to make a deliberate upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring it back.

I am not saying I disagree with the change, but I think it is interesting to make this shift just as the Home indicator has gained additional functionality. It also makes it even odder to me that it is one of the things which remains constantly visible on a sleeping iPhone with an always-on display.

Apple Formally Appeals DMA Penalty ⇥ 9to5mac.com

When Apple recently tried again to comply with European competition laws, I noticed some peculiar phrasing in its announcement:

The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act: […]

The wording of this sentence makes it sound like the list of specific policies following it were dictated by the European Commission, but I am not sure that is true.

This was not an accidental implication, as it turns out, if you believe Apple’s side of the story.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac, reporting on Apple appealing the fines issued in April:

Furthermore, Apple says that the EU mandated that the Store Services Fee include multiple tiers. […]

Apple says that it was the EU who dictated which features should be included in which tier. For example, the EU mandated that Apple move app discovery features to the second tier.

Manton Reece:

Something isn’t adding up here. If the EU is dictating anything, it should be a 0% fee tier in addition to the standard App Store paid tier. Why would the EU be moving features to the second tier? Either Apple isn’t communicating the full story, or negotiations between Apple and the EU are very dysfunctional.

If regulators have taken on such an involved role in App Store policy, one has to wonder when that started. Was it the result of the April penalty, or has it been an ongoing conversation? If it is the latter, it suggests many other questions.

Transparent Development ⇥ arstechnica.com

One of the stranger qualities of this year’s Liquid Glass visual update is how much it is changing within just a few weeks. One would assume some designers with power at Apple would have recognized the illegibility of the first version before it was made available in June. Alas, it seems Apple is working things out in public now.

“Public” is a relative term. The ’26 operating systems are currently only being previewed to developers or, as it turns out, “developers” like me. Apple has not yet released a public beta. According to data collected by TelemetryDeck, iOS 26 (also referred to as “iOS 19” in their stats) is being used by around 2.5% of users of apps containing its analytics product. Even so, that could be millions of people at the scale of iOS.

Though I know there were changes in different releases of the iOS 7 development cycle, the first thing I thought of was the progression of Aqua in early builds of Mac OS X, first revealed in the second developer preview of 10.0. The most noticeable changes happened in the dock which, in the second and third previews, looked like a set of individual sometimes-underlined tiles. Those builds were released in January and February 2000; by the fourth preview, in May, the dock was closer to the version which eventually shipped. But those changes took place over many months; Mac OS X 10.0 did not ship to the public until March 2001. Complaints about the legibility of various translucent elements, however, were whittled away at for years to come. I have not seen anyone claim this was evidence Apple was misguided from the start with Aqua.

Assuming the entire Liquid Glass concept was a lock for the ’26 operating systems, would it be more or less acceptable for Apple to have shipped with the version debuted at WWDC, with any changes needing to wait until next year? I think it would have been silly to ship something clearly flawed — and flawedly clear, I suppose. It is not evidence Apple has been wrong all along when it comes to the ideas behind Liquid Glass, though it indicates the unique problems faced when working with transparency. But, also, you would think a company that has been working with transparent interfaces for twenty-five years would have some institutional memory and know what to avoid.

This rapid iteration is also a reminder of the pressure of Apple’s annual shipping schedule. As with iOS 7, I expect U.I. adjustments will continue in updates in the coming year.

Liquid Glass Differences Between the Second and Third Betas ⇥ birchtree.me

Matt Birchler:

As many now have commented on, today’s OS 26 betas tone down the liquid glass effect quite a bit on many elements in the operating system, and I’ve collected a few that stand out to me.

Liquid Glass officially has two appearances: clear and “regular”, which is frosted. If there have been any changes to the clear style in any of the betas, I cannot say I have noticed them. But the frosted style has become steadily more opaque since the first developer build of iOS 26 in some places. In particular, when iOS is in light mode and the screen is predominantly white, like the buttons in a Mail message, the effect is now extremely subtle, to the point where I wonder if there is a third Liquid Glass appearance.

I have no evidence for this other than the stark difference I can see between, say, the Notification Centre background — which obviously uses the clear appearance — the buttons at the bottom of, say, Mail or Music, and the edit menu, which appears to be about halfway as opaque. Without hard evidence for a third appearance, I have to assume this is either an optical illusion created by the size of each element, or the edit menu actually has a clear appearance, not regular as I have assumed.

Pressure on Substack ⇥ newsletter.anamariecox.com

Rebecca Falconer, Axios:

Veteran journalist Terry Moran, who abruptly left ABC News after calling President Trump and top aide Stephen Miller “world-class” haters, announced Wednesday that he’s moving to the newsletter platform Substack.

Jessica Testa, New York Times:

In January, the start-up best known for email newsletters gave all users the ability to publish live video. Now it is home to a handful of cable stars marooned from their mainstream media jobs amid reshuffled lineups, salary cuts and other controversies. On Substack, where politics is the most popular and lucrative category, anti-Trump publishers have been performing particularly well.

Nina Jankowicz, the American Sunlight Project:

Substack has gone even further, arguing that they’re not a social media platform, just a newsletter service, so they don’t need to do content moderation in the traditional sense. This may have been true in Substack’s early days when it was truly just a tech stack that sent emails out, but couldn’t be farther from the truth today. Algorithmic recommendations abound. Substack’s “Notes,” was, for about a millisecond, seen as an heir of Twitter. Writers can interact with specific communities they build in “Chats,” similar to Facebook Groups. It’s a social network.

Ana Marie Cox:

Right now, Substack is independent of the political pressures that might have pushed ABC to let Terry Moran go. But it’s utterly dependent on the whims of its investors. Every round of capital deepens the expectation of a big payoff. Substack doesn’t need to be sustainable to survive. It just needs to be buyable.

[…]

The problem isn’t just that Substack makes money off Nazis, it’s that they don’t seem to care who they make it from.

Substack has certainly faced pressure from different groups about — among other things — the extent of its moderation practices, but that is largely because it has made its presence prominent. It is not just another web host or utilitarian provider of paid bulk emails. It is a name brand — an increasingly complex platform. That makes it attractive to venture capitalists who have dumped nearly $100 million into building it up.

It would be odd if the economics of Substack — a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers — are somehow better than those of, say, a magazine publisher today — also a collection of writers and publications with paying subscribers. It does have a tech sheen and the vibe of social networking, though, and there are no printing costs.

Yet it is still another platform hosted elsewhere. It simplifies the process for writers, podcasters, video creators, and others to publish their work for money. But their stuff is still made available at the mercy of software they do not control — and I bet there will be a time when Substack decides to make a controversial platform-wide change some publishers will want to back away from. The pressure is already there.

Supposed Parallels Between Meta’s ‘A.I. Superintelligence’ Effort and the ‘Metaverse’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Jonathan Vanian, CNBC:

Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that he’s creating Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by some of his company’s most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Zuckerberg said the new AI superintelligence unit, MSL, will house the company’s various teams working on foundation models such as the open-source Llama software, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research projects, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.

Kyle Orland, Ars Technica:

When I hear Zuckerberg talk about the promise of AI these days, it’s hard not to hear echoes of his monumental vision for the metaverse from 2021. If anything, Zuckerberg’s vision of our AI-powered future is even more grandiose than his view of the metaverse.

Orland allows for key differences, like how people actually use A.I. products, including those from Meta — Zuckerberg says “more than 1 billion monthly actives”. That seems, to me, to be a pretty big caveat. The series 404 Media has been running about A.I. slop on Facebook looks bad, but at it suggests people are using A.I. in connection with Meta’s products, something nobody can say about the metaverse it decided to use as the foundation for rebranding itself. Embarrassing.

A good faith read of Orland’s argument is that Meta is taking advantage of — and growing — the hype around A.I. in the same way as it attempted to do with the metaverse. This is obviously not a new thing for tech companies. They routinely proclaim world-changing advancements without earning it, and Meta is a particularly poor narrator of its own supposed brilliance. I would not trust it — but not because this all sounds a bit like the metaverse. Meta and Zuckerberg personally simply have not demonstrated a capacity for being visionary. The company has a knack for acquisitions and an ability to retain users’ attention. It has not shown an ability to invent the future.

The U.S. Government’s Astonishing Constitutional Claims on TikTok ⇥ lawfaremedia.org

Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Lawfare:

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) release, we now have the letters that Attorney General Pam Bondi sent to major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Oracle regarding their continued business with TikTok. These letters provide a legal rationale (if it can be called that) for the Trump administration’s commitment not to enforce the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACAA), the divestment-or-ban law that the Supreme Court upheld in January. The letters make two central claims, both of which are astonishing in their breadth and implications for executive power.

TikTok is far from the most pressing governance issue of the United States today, but this reasoning should be alarming to anyone paying close attention. I also find the compliance of tech companies in this case far more concerning than in, say, the Gulf of America situation. At least there, they could point to updates made to official documentation. In continuing to provide access to TikTok despite its illegality, however, it is because of a mix of public pressure, group compliance — nobody wants to be the one company refusing to permit TikTok — and cozying up to a kingly president.

Branded Quality in the Age of Slop ⇥ zhenyi.gibber.blog

Zhenyi Tan:

With advertising, the market acts as if all goods are high-quality. When everything claims to be high-quality, consumers no longer know what high quality means. Over time, people can no longer differentiate between high and low-quality products. Then they no longer care. They’ve lost their taste.

Recently, I was trying to buy a watch winder for my father-in-law. I went to Amazon, and every watch winder is from an unpronounceable, alphabet-soup brand. They all had 4.2 stars. How could I tell which one was better? I had no idea. So I checked Reddit, and the only “branded” recommendation was a Wolf watch winder that costs thousands of dollars. I just wanted a machine that rotates a few times per day.

One of the things a brand is supposed to do is to align a set of products with the distinct qualities of their maker. If you buy tickets from Air Canada or WestJet, you understand it to have the backing and reputation of a company interested in maintaining a specific reputation. But this does not always pan out for two reasons. One is that some companies, like Flair Airlines, do not give a single care about how they are perceived and have nothing to lose by being terrible.

The other, though, is what Tan is getting at in this essay: name-brands compromise trust for volume, to the extent it is hard to distinguish them from some Scrabble-bag Amazon seller. This is particularly pronounced in luxury circles — Gucci and Louis Vuitton are not selling belts and card holders and fragrances because they believe they are particularly good examples of their craft — and it is similarly true in the more normal worlds I and (probably) you spend time in. The stuff on Amazon looks an awful lot like the stuff you might buy in a store; it might even be some of the same stuff. But it is difficult to know when everyone seems to be dishonest.

We are rapidly losing any framework we may have had for trust. It is hard not to see the products of A.I. making that worse, at least for now. I am not saying it is suddenly making us believe all sorts of horrible or untrue things we did not think before, but I do think its existence accelerates the ongoing erosion of trust.

Magic Lasso Adblock Now Blocks Ads in Third-Party Apps ⇥ magiclasso.co

Frequent sponsor of the site Magic Lasso Adblock has just released an update bringing its capabilities outside Safari to apps across your system. (This is not a sponsored post.) I have been using this version for about a week now and, while it does not yet eliminate all ads in third-party apps, it has solved a specific iOS frustration.

After iOS began registering taps immediately, I found scrolling apps with interstitial ads — particularly news apps like those from CBC News and the New York Times — to be particularly hostile. I would scroll and then, while intending to stop the scroll, often tap on an ad which would send me to Safari. Irritating. Not all ads are blocked in these apps, but enough are that it has improved my news reading.

More broadly, ad blocking is an ethical dilemma. I find arguments in favour of advertising generally compelling, but I reject how often they are conflated with behaviourally targeted advertising. I think it is fair to use advertising as a financial support — heck, I have ads on this website and I accept sponsorships, including from this very ad blocker. However, I do not think we should relinquish our right to privacy to provide this financial backing. We know ads in third-party apps are among the most capable and precise means of sweeping up vast amounts of our data. It is unfair how little control we have over how much we feed this surveillance machine. We can effectively minimize it only by using wide-ranging tools like ad blockers.

This is a pretty blunt instrument. The VPN-based nature of this in-app ad blocking strategy has no fine-grained controls at the moment — no allow or deny lists, for example. But it is one of the better strategies for improving your privacy.

Google Ends Test of ‘Recipe Quick View’ in Search Results ⇥ bloomberg.com

Julia Love and Davey Alba, Bloomberg:

In recent months, Alphabet Inc.-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers’ content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.

Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial. “We continually experiment with ways to make it easier for people to find helpful information on Search,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement. “Learnings from these experiments help to inform future development and efforts.”

Google began testing this feature around October. While the company did not provide any commentary beyond well-worn lines about “always experimenting”, it is not unreasonable to see it as a reaction to common tactics by recipe bloggers to juice their organic rankings and ad revenue. Google has repeatedly explained that it values just the recipe, but folk wisdom among bloggers indicates that alone is insufficient for ranking well. Alas, I am not sure how much any of this matters in an era of A.I. results.

Also, the word is “lessons”.

Canada to Rescind Digital Services Tax ⇥ canada.ca

The Government of Canada:

To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States. Consistent with this action, Prime Minister Carney and President Trump have agreed that parties will resume negotiations with a view towards agreeing on a deal by July 21, 2025.

Is this “elbows up”?

The Digital Services Tax Is the New Reason Our Neighbour Is Angry ⇥ cbc.ca

John Paul Tasker, CBC News:

U.S. President Donald Trump says he’s ending all trade discussions with Canada to hit back at Ottawa for slapping a tax on web giants — and he wants it removed before negotiations can begin again.

His objection is, ostensibly, about its apparent targeting of companies based in the United States. This is a very silly complaint. The U.S. seized the heart of the tech economy and, instead of cooperating with others, used it as leverage around the world. That is one reason for its unrivalled dominance in the industry. Any tax on tech companies will disproportionately affect U.S. businesses, but they have been exerting disproportionate influence around the world for decades.

Brendan Ruberry, Semafor:

Canada’s 3% digital services tax went into effect last year, but its first payments are due Monday, with US companies expected to shell out nearly $2.7 billion. Trump said US tariffs on Canadian goods would be applied within the next week. Last month, the US and UK agreed [to] a trade deal despite Westminster enacting a 2020 digital services tax.

This is just the latest thing our hostile neighbour can use to try and make us crack. If there were no tax, there would be something else to complain about, because we are not dealing with a reasonable administration that wants mutually beneficial trade arrangements.

As far as I can see, this tax makes sense. Unlike the Online News Act, which requires large platforms to pay for some traffic they send elsewhere, this act is specifically about revenue extracted from Canadians by businesses that are only beginning to see antitrust regulation.

Developers React to E.U. App Store Changes ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Michal Tsai:

I find this really confusing, but I think when they say “single business model” they mean unifying the CTF and the CTC and the previous “alternative” terms for apps that are not using the traditional App Store model. There are still two models in that you can do the simple flat rate that’s the same throughout the world or the complicated and ever-changing EU model that supposedly satisfies the DMA.

Riley Testut:

Goodbye ridiculous Core Technology Fee, hello slightly-more-reasonable Core Technology Commission 👋

“Slightly” being a key word.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

It’s not zero, but these terms are way more reasonable than the Core Technology Fee bullshit. But it also means that there is, from my understanding, no option for alternative distribution that is completely free. The lowest amount you will pay is 10%

Just to confuse matters, it looks like if you remain in the App Store and have a paid-upfront app, your app purchase commission fees are either 20% or 13% (small business program), down from the 30% and 15% today?

Jeff Johnson:

What I found striking about the search differences between Tier 1 and Tier 2 is that in creating this distinction, Apple clearly considers App Store search to be a developer feature rather than a user feature. In other words, the user’s interest in finding an app via search is disregarded, and Apple is willing to be less helpful to users to the extent that app developers pay a lesser commission to Apple. A common talking point in defense of Apple’s App Store lockdown on iOS is that the App Store is supposed to be for the benefit of users rather than developers. Apple’s new policies give the lie to that notion.

Assuming this meets the policies laid out by the European Commission, I am curious to see how the changes affect different developers. As I wrote yesterday, it seems like this is complicated enough to make comparisons or predictions very difficult. A developer with existing marketing channels may find the more restricted App Store search functionality a smaller issue, but may be stung by the lack of automatic updates. A smaller developer would likely benefit most from a smaller commission to Apple, but may find the App Store limitations too restrictive.

But perhaps users may ultimately come out on top if App Store search is kneecapped. Perhaps Apple’s proposals will encourage more third-party app marketplaces, giving Apple competition for reaching users on its platform. Then, perhaps, the company would find reasons to loosen its reins and change its relationship with developers without being compelled by courts or regulators.

Or maybe Apple will preload Android onto its E.U.-bound iPhones. Seems similarly likely.

Apple Tries Again With E.U. App Distribution Policies ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple:

The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act: […]

The wording of this sentence makes it sound like the list of specific policies following it were dictated by the European Commission, but I am not sure that is true.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Fees have changed for developers offering external purchases, too, and include:

  • an initial acquisition fee of 2% is charged for sales made within six months of a user’s first unpaid installation of an app;

  • a 5% or 13% store services fee depending on the store services used for any purchases made within 12 months of an app’s download;

  • for apps that offer external purchases, a Core Technology Commission (not Fee) of 5% for purchases made within 12 months of installation will be charged;

[…]

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

For developers on Apple’s standard business terms in the EU, there is a new Core Technology Commission. Instead of the per-install fee, they will pay a 5% commission on sales made through in-app promotion of alternative payments.

Apple also announced today that it will shift to a new unified business model in the EU by January 1, 2026. Under this unified model, a developer will transition from the Core Technology Fee to the newly announced Core Technology Commission, which is paid based on the sales of digital goods and services, rather than app downloads.

Apple:

  • Store Services Tier 1: This tier provides capabilities needed for app delivery, trust & safety, app management, and engagement; and features a reduced store services fee. This tier is mandatory for apps communicating and promoting offers.

  • Store Services Tier 2: This tier is optional, and provides additional capabilities for app delivery and management, engagement, curation & personalization, app insights, and developer marketing.

Developers can move an app between tiers on a per-app, per-storefront basis once a quarter. […]

Notable omissions from apps on the first tier include ratings and reviews, search features other than exact matches, automatic updates, and bulk app management through Business Manager or School Manager. These and other features are apparently worth eight points of app-based digital purchase revenue.

This is complicated. What I would love to see are different practical examples comparing Apple’s distribution policies in most countries, its policies in the U.S. post-ruling, its previous E.U. policies, and these new ones. But there are a lot of variables here to the extent making an accurate comparison may be difficult. A more cynical person may say that is by design, and it would be hard to dispute that. But it is also the result of Apple’s specific and sometimes contradictory monetization decisions.

Adaptive Power Mode in iOS 26 ⇥ macrumors.com

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Last week, we reported that iOS 26 introduces an opt-in Adaptive Power Mode on the iPhone, alongside the existing Low Power Mode.

[…]

iOS 26 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and newer, but unfortunately Adaptive Power Mode is only available on the iPhone 15 Pro models and newer. This is because the AI-powered feature requires an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence.

This appears to be the feature Mark Gurman reported in May was coming to this year’s iOS updates, about which I commented:

[…] Gurman says this is “part of the Apple Intelligence platform”, but also says it “will be available for all iPhones that have iOS 19”. This is confusing. Apple has so far marketed Apple Intelligence as being available on only a subset of devices supporting iOS 18. Either Apple’s delineation of “Apple Intelligence” features is about to get even fuzzier, or one of the two statements Gurman made is going to be wrong.

Turns out one of those two statements was wrong.

Apple says Adaptive Power Mode “can make small performance adjustments to extend your battery life, including slightly lowering the display brightness or allowing some activities to take a little longer”. Mysterious. Unlike Low Power Mode, it is not (yet?) available as a toggle in Control Centre. I have turned it on to see what it does in the real world.

Apple Abuses Wallet Push Notifications to Advertise Its New Movie ⇥ mjtsai.com

In March 2020, Apple changed its rules to formally permit ads in push notifications. I wrote:

Notably, there is also no requirement that push notification ads be a promotion for the app or its features. It seems perfectly legal under these rules for unscrupulous developers to sell push notification ad slots to third parties. Gross.

Well, it apparently decided to promote its new Formula 1 movie in partnership with Fandango. Casey Liss was one of many to share a screenshot of a push notification from Wallet reading:

$10 off at Fandango

Save on 2+ tickets to F1® The Movie with APPLEPAYTEN. Ends 6/29. While supplies last. Terms apply.

This is not really an ad for Wallet. It is an ad for Fandango to promote Apple’s movie, tickets for which may be added to Wallet. This is not the only time Apple has promoted its services through push notifications and in-app banners, and it is far from the only company doing this. It is tacky — yet the only surprising thing about it is how it is possible for a multi-trillion-dollar company to still feel like a sellout.

Wearable A.I. Device Company iyO Disputes OpenAI’s Recently Acquired Wearable A.I. Device company io ⇥ techcrunch.com

Anthony Ha, TechCrunch:

The iyO in question emerged from the Alphabet X “moonshot factory,” and its first announced product is a set of generative AI-powered earbuds. An earlier report at Bloomberg Law noted that iyO had brought a trademark lawsuit against OpenAI, with the judge suggesting she’s open to the company’s argument that OpenAI’s promotional video might already be creating consumer confusion.

A wearable device with an A.I. spin introduced in a TED Talk? Where have I seen this before? Oh, right. Still, hard for me to believe io and iyO would not be easily confused. The latter’s domain was registered a full year before Ive’s io was revealed in a New York Times article.

Apple Says MacOS 27 Will Not Support AirPort Time Capsule Backups ⇥ macrumors.com

“Stella Fudge” on Twitter:

Goodbye Time Capsule support 💔

[Time Machine screenshot, with the notice: “Disk Not Recommended for Backups The next major version of macOS will no longer support AirPort Disk, or other Time Capsule disks, for Time Machine backups.”]

Apple:

Time Machine can back up to the built-in disk of another Mac on your network, or to an external storage device connected to that Mac.

If either Mac is using macOS Catalina or earlier, this solution is no longer recommended, because Time Machine backup over the network to or from those earlier macOS versions uses Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), which won’t be supported in a future version of macOS.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Starting with macOS 27, Time Capsule backups will require a storage drive that supports more current file-sharing protocols like SMBv2 and SMBv3.

I have, rather embarrassingly, procrastinated replacing the hard drive for our networked Time Machine backup for nearly two years. That backup is connected to a MacBook Air which cannot be upgraded past MacOS Catalina, at least officially. So I guess I now have two problems to figure out.

Anyone have experience with barrykn’s patcher on a mid-2012 MacBook Air?

Perplexity Is Out Here Wearing a Sandwich Board ⇥ bigtechnology.com

All of these stories were published yesterday. I am linking to them in chronological order.

Alex Kantrowitz, in his Big Technology newsletter:

Tim Cook ought to call Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and offer him $30 billion for his AI search engine. And he should do it right away.

[…]

“Not likely!” Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told me of a potential tie-up with Apple. “But Meta-Scale is so unlikely that I feel we aren’t living in a world of likelies.”

Apple and Perplexity have had no M&A discussions to date, Shevelenko added, not even a wink.

Mark Gurman, Katie Roof, and Riley Griffin, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc. held discussions with artificial intelligence search startup Perplexity AI Inc. about a possible takeover before moving ahead with a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, according to people familiar with the matter.

Deirdre Bosa and Ashley Capoot, of CNBC, confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting, adding that one source “said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal”.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. executives have held internal discussions about potentially bidding for artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI, seeking to address the need for more AI talent and technology.

You will note the day began with Kantrowitz’s article calling for Apple to buy Perplexity. It was not a reaction to Gurman’s report, which was published late in the afternoon and came after a different story about another possible Perplexity acquisition, to which Gurman also contributed. Heck of a coincidence all of these dropped on the same day.

Cloudflare CEO Confirms the Obvious About What A.I. Answer Engines Do to Publisher Traffic ⇥ axios.com

Christine Wang, Axios:

Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per [Cloudflare CEO Matthew] Prince.

[…]

Now:

  • For Google, it’s 18:1

  • For OpenAI, it’s 1,500:1

  • For Anthropic, it’s 60,000:1

It is a curious side effect of Cloudflare’s size and position that it is among a true handful of companies with this kind of visibility into a meaningful slice of global web traffic.

In an alternate world, these artificial intelligence businesses may have tried to work with publishers. Perhaps they would have given greater prominence to references, self-policed the amount of summarization they would offer, and provide some kind of financial kickback. Instead, they have trained their systems on publishers’ vast libraries without telling them until it is far too late for it to matter. They take so much while providing so little in return. This will surely accelerate the walling-off of the necessarily paid web, further affirming what I have taken to calling “Robinson’s Law”. This helps explain the increasingly unethical means of acquiring this training data.

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Roundrect Dictator

I have many thoughts about the redesigned elements common across most of Apple’s platforms but they are still brewing, much as I hope the same is true for the visual interface itself. There is one thing, though, which is a downright shame: Apple’s guidance for the shape of Mac app icons:

An app icon’s shape varies based on a platform’s visual language. In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself. In tvOS, icons are rectangular, also with concentric edges. In visionOS and watchOS, icons are square and the system applies circular masking.

This is no longer optional, but mandated by the system. App icons across Apple’s three most popular operating systems share a similar rounded square mask, and it is a downgrade. Simon B. Støvring correctly calls out the “expressive, varied app icons, a case of character over conformity” as a highlight of past versions of MacOS. I miss detailed and artistic app icons plenty. Indulging in realistic textures and thoughtful rendering was not only a differentiator for the Mac; it also conveyed the sense an app was built with a high degree of care.

Perhaps that is largely a product of nostalgia. Change can be uncomfortable, but it could be for good reasons. Stripping icons of their detail might not be bad, just different. But wrapping everything in a uniform shape? That is, dare I say, an objective degradation.

Since MacOS Big Sur debuted the precursor to this format, I have found it harder to differentiate between applications which, as I understand it, is the very function and purpose of an icon. I know this has been a long-running gripe for those of us of a certain age, but it remains true, and a walk through the history of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines indicates the company also understands it to be true.

The uniform rounded rectangular icons in MacOS Tahoe are the product of a slow but steady series of changes Apple has made to its guidance beginning with OS X Yosemite. At its introduction at WWDC 2014, Craig Federighi said those icons were “beautifully crafted”, “so clean and yet so fundamentally still Mac”. While Apple has long provided recommendations for icon shapes and the angle at which objects should sit, its Yosemite guidelines tended to converge around specific shapes. However, Apple still advised “giving your app icon a realistic, unique shape”, since a “unique outline focuses attention on the depicted object and makes it easier for users to recognize the icon at a glance”. It also said developers should not use the same icon as a companion iOS app, since “you don’t want to imply that your app isn’t tailored for the OS X environment”.

By the next major redesign in MacOS Big Sur, Apple was extolling the “harmonious user experience” of “a common set of visual attributes, including the rounded-rectangle shape, front-facing perspective, level position, and uniform drop shadow”. Still, it emphasized the delight of including a “familiar tool” and “realistic objects” in an icon, in a manner that “float[s] just above the background and extend[s] slightly past the icon boundaries”. This is one of the reasons the MarsEdit icon remains so distinctive to me — not only does the rocket ship have enough contrast with the background, its silhouette is not the same as the icons for Mimestream above it or Fantastical below it. This is not a knock against either of those two apps; they are understandably following the documentation Apple provides and follows with all the first-party app icons I also keep in my dock.

MacOS Tahoe overrides all this previous guidance in both written policy and technical implementation. Apple, as quoted above, now says icons should be square, and the system will take care of rounding the corners — just like on iOS. Since iOS apps can run on MacOS, a lack of being “tailored for the [MacOS] environment” is no longer seen by Apple as something to caution against. But it goes further. Designers should, in its words, “embrace simplicity”:

An icon with fine visual features might look busy when rendered with system-provided shadows and highlights, and details may be hard to discern at smaller sizes. […]

Designers no longer get to decide highlights and shadows, the system does. It defines the shape, too, and non-updated icons that do not conform are doomed to live out their days in a little grey jail cell.

Apple used to guide designers on how to make smaller icons by removing details and simplifying. Something you will often hear from designers is the fun and challenge of very small icons; how does one convey the same impression of fidelity when you have exactly 256 pixels to use? It is a delicate feat. Now, Apple simply says no icon — no matter how large — is deserving of detail. This, to me, betrays a lack of trust in the third-party designers it apparently celebrates.

Moreover, it fundamentally contradicts longstanding icon design principles. Reducing each application’s visual identity to a simple glyph — albeit with the potential for a few layers — on a coloured background necessarily leads to this perverse revision of Figure 5–15 from the 2004 Human Interface Guidelines:

A comparison of four icons in the first row each set in rounded squares of blue, orange, red, and green, each with a different white glyph. In the second row are four black rounded squares.

Though this description and figure is specifically regarding toolbar icons, Apple’s rationale for using different shapes remains clear-eyed and simply expressed:

Each toolbar icon should be easily and quickly distinguishable from the other items in the toolbar. Toolbar icons emphasize their outline form, rather than subtler visual details.

Perhaps this reasoning is incorrect. If so, the current guidelines make no effort to explain how or why users are not guided by outline in addition to colour and enclosed shape. Apple simply says icons should be constructed “in a simple, unique way with a minimal number of shapes” on “a simple background, such as a solid colour or gradient”. Not only are there no longer any “subtler visual details”, there is also no distinct outline for each icon. I believe limitations spur creativity, but imposed uniformity sure makes that difficult. This is, however, apparently required because of new icon formats available to users, including a clear version that makes it look as though the glyph and base are an ice sculpture: cool, but entirely indistinguishable from others surrounding it. Again, this wrests control away from designers to give a little bit to users, but only at the behest of and within the boundaries of Apple’s mandates.

The technical and feature improvements in MacOS Tahoe are intriguing. I sure hope the Spotlight improvements are as excellent as they seem to be since I expect I will be increasingly dependent upon it as an application launcher. I am also excited to try Liquid Glass on a Mac. Though I remain skeptical, it is at least interesting. That is something I find difficult to see in the new direction of MacOS icons.

Toward a Theory of Kevin Roose ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it. The rest — what you say, what you do — is just enacting your pick and working in service to it.

This article crystallizes for me the uncomfortable feeling I have about prediction markets, generally, and the specific feeling I got when I read the phrase “[c]ombining Polymarket’s accurate, unbiased, and real-time prediction market probabilities with Grok’s analysis and X’s real time insights”. The whole point is to turn someone’s being correct — not right, in any moral or ethical sense, nor principled, but merely correct — into money, which is the purest expression of the fiction that being financially successful is a product of being smart, and vice versa.

Border Bill Powers Would Allow Warrantless Police Requests to ‘Public Services’ of All Types ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Marie Woolf, of the Globe and Mail, reporting on the extraordinarily broad provisions of Bill C-2:

New powers in the government’s border bill would allow the police and CSIS to request information on whether people have accessed services from abortion clinics, doctors, hotels and other entities without a warrant from a judge, experts warn.

Michael Geist:

There is no definition or obvious limitation on the services in question or the person who provides them – it could be a telecom provider, physician, hospital, library, educational institution, or financial institution. But why stop there? The provision is so broad that your dry cleaner or barber are captured by it. If served with the appropriate form, anyone who provides services is required to confirm whether they have provided services to any subscriber, client, account, or identifier. They must also disclose whether they have any information about the subscriber, client, account or identifier as well as advise where and when they provided the service. On top of that, they must advise when they started providing the service and list the names of any other person that may have provided other services.

Kate Robertson, of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab:

While Bill C-2 does not explicitly state that it is paving the way for new and expanded data-sharing with the United States or other countries, the legislation contains references to the potential for “agreement[s] or arrangement[s]” with a foreign state, and references elsewhere the potential that persons in Canada may become compelled by the laws of a foreign state to disclose information. Other data and surveillance powers in Bill C-2 read like they could have been drafted by U.S. officials.

Robertson and the Citizen Lab explain how this seems to be driven by compliance with the Second Additional Protocol to the Cybercrime Convention, but it could have far-reaching implications as currently drafted.

Samsung Exec: Smart T.V. ‘Advertisers Want [To] Know Exactly What You Ate for Breakfast’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

Most smart TV operating system (OS) owners are in the ad sales business now. Software providers for budget and premium TVs are honing their ad skills, which requires advancing their ability to collect user data. This is creating an “inherent conflict” within the industry, Takashi Nakano, VP of content and programming at Samsung TV Plus, said at the StreamTV Show in Denver last week.

During a panel at StreamTV Insider’s conference entitled “CTV OS Leader Roundtable: From Drivers to Engagement and Content Strategy,” Nakano acknowledged the opposing needs of advertisers and smart TV users, who are calling for a reasonable amount of data privacy.

Thanks to the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, the country actually has privacy protections specifically related to television and video services. Yet even with all the data advertisers are able to obtain — sometimes illicitly — it is never enough for this greedy, unethical industry.

Craig Federighi on the iPad ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci, MacStories:

It’s a cool, sunny morning at Apple Park as I’m walking my way along the iconic glass ring to meet with Apple’s SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, for a conversation about the iPad.

[…]

I came into this WWDC thinking – or, at the very least, hoping – that Apple would show a newfound commitment to the iPad and iPadOS, addressing the longstanding concerns of those who have been pushing iPadOS to its limits while keeping true to the essence of the device. It’s a careful balancing act, but having tried iPadOS 26 on my 13” iPad Pro for the past week, it seems clear to me that Apple delivered this year.

An on-the-record interview with an Apple executive is always going to be a guarded affair, and this is no different. Federighi is very clearly trying to sell the achievements of iPadOS 26 without veering into substantial self-criticism.

I understand all of that, yet I think Viticci’s interview is worth every word. It is a beautifully written article, and both parties explore depths of the iPad’s existence I had not considered for a long time. Federighi directly addresses critics who thought Apple is perhaps coasting on the iPad — not me directly, of course, but along similar lines to what I wrote last year about the latest iPad Pro models.

To Apple’s credit, here is what I will say: for the first time in many years, I am seriously considering buying a new iPad. But I know this system too well; I recognize it is perhaps best to wait for iPadOS reviews before I commit. I like the iPad a lot conceptually. I have consistently found it frustrating in practice. Perhaps this is the year that breaks the trend.

Mastodon and Ivory in the WWDC Keynote ⇥ schwarztech.net

Parker Ortolani:

One of my favorite moments from WWDC 2025 was when Apple designer Billy Sorrentino introduced the changes to visual intelligence. The new screenshot features in iOS 26 are already among my favorites, but what really caught my eye was the surprising amount of screen time given to Tapbots’ Ivory.

Ortolani describes this as an “endorsement”, “snuck” into the presentation. I am not sure it is either. For one thing, these presentations are obviously choreographed with each segment approved by many, many people. Nothing truly sneaks in. For another, I do not know that this is endorsing Mastodon as much as it is evading one, as Eric Schwarz writes:

I also noticed this during the keynote and I think it served a few subtle purposes: highlight an indie developer (Tapbots) that has been developing for Apple’s platforms for years, serve as a way to avoid endorsing a specific commercial social network, and potentially throw some support (indirectly) behind Mastodon. It doesn’t appear that Sorrentino has an account, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone on the team that worked on his portion of the presentation does.

Apple probably does not want to associate with Meta’s family of social apps. TikTok is problematic for some number of people and probably not a good illustration of this feature. X is, well, you know. What typical social platforms are left — LinkedIn?

I obviously checked if these were real accounts — Apple used to have a set of fakey Twitter accounts it used in demos like these. But I could not find any public record of them. That is another advantage of Mastodon: Apple could be running a private instance internally just for demos like these. Or, of course, the whole thing could just be a mockup of sorts.

Rounded Corners and Fidelity ⇥ folklore.org

Howard Oakley:

By now you’ll have guessed I’m no fan of Apple’s new-found obsession with rounding every right angle in sight. I have yet to see any objective evidence that this has any purpose beyond aesthetics. If you’ve seen screenshots of the first developer beta-release of macOS 26 Tahoe, then you’ll surely have noticed that, rather than restoring fidelity to Quick Look, this fiction has grown and only become more prominent. I demonstrate this in a series of four screenshots showing the same image that have been rescaled to similar display sizes.

Oakley illustrates the presence of rounded corners clipping the edges of an image in Finder, Quick Look, and across the bottom of a Preview window. Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not believe this issue is new to MacOS Tahoe. Preview in MacOS Sequoia also has rounded corners, albeit not to the same extent. If the corners are bothersome, the image can be zoomed out to show it rendered faithfully.

(Update: After using MacOS Tahoe, here is one area not mentioned by Oakley where I firmly disagree with the extreme corner radii in the system — multipage PDF documents in Preview. Each page, bafflingly, gets significant rounded corners, and there is no way to turn this off. At no zoom level does each page get its original squared corners. An awful and selfish design choice.)

But this is actually a good theoretical design question: are squared-off corners more honest? Is that something which only applies to images? QuickTime has, since 2009, rounded the corners of its video player. What about webpages, seeing as the bottom corners of Safari are also rounded? Are right angles ultimately the only honest corners as we use square pixels on our screens? I am not being entirely facetious. Rounded corners may be a little cheeky, a little less than honest, but they soften the otherwise stark way applications are drawn.

Andy Hertzfeld, in 1981:

Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?”

“No, there’s no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don’t think we really need it”. I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn’t raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.

Steve suddenly got more intense. “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”. And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”. He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

The Bill here is, of course, the late Bill Atkinson, who softened the corners of a great deal of Mac apps and system features.

Invoking Atkinson, Jobs, and the history of the Mac is not a valid explanation for the MacOS of today or tomorrow. But I cannot object to rounded rectangles on fidelity grounds alone.

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Writing Tools Updates in MacOS Tahoe ⇥ developer.apple.com

I have been skimming through many of the WWDC videos from this year, and the one on Writing Tools updates caught my attention. You may remember I was frustrated by the current version’s brittle presentation, and the inability to see what changes had been made by Proofread and Rewrite.

Now, it seems from this video that improvements have been made — see the demos at 8:21, 11:09, and 15:27. It still does not seem to show the difference after using Rewrite as changes are made in-place, but at least it is no longer using a popover. I will likely have more to say after I test this, something which I do not plan on doing until MacOS is closer to a release version.

Shy U.I. ⇥ mastodon.social

Tuomas Hämäläinen:

Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.

It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.

I am still getting my bearings on even a first impression of Liquid Glass — for reasons good and bad — but this design goal continues to irk me.

In part, that is because the word “content” makes a little vomit come up in my mouth. Also, this does not seem like a worthwhile goal for human interface design in most applications. The kinds of devices Apple makes are largely interactive. It makes sense for a television set to get out of the way — what you want to see is a movie or a show, not the bezel, the manufacturer’s logo, or anything else. Regardless of whether you are using your iPhone or your Mac, you are probably doing something with what you are seeing. Even if you are semi-passively scrolling social media, you might tap on a profile or share a post. What you can do with what you are seeing onscreen should be evident; it should not recede to the point where it is unclear what is interactive.

The visual language Apple introduced to the Mac, in particular, with Big Sur was a significant regression in this area. I need to spend more time with Liquid Glass, but at least it is more clear that the monochrome icons in toolbars are actually clickable buttons, so that is a plus.

Live Activities in iPadOS 26 Seem Like a Preview of the All-Screen iPhone ⇥ pxlnv.com

After the Information reported last month that a truly all-screen iPhone would be arriving next year, I wondered how Apple would handle Dynamic Island stuff without the excuse of a camera cutout. I, for some reason, assumed this stuff would just go away.

I probably overthought this greatly. Take a look at how background tasks are handled in iPadOS 26. They are Live Activities spawned from the Dynamic Island when available, but not dependent on the Dynamic Island. While that software convention emerged from a hardware compromise, it might continue to exist even if the hardware has been updated.

Admittedly, Apple has only shown this for background tasks; it has not enabled full Dynamic Island-style functionality on iPads. But it seems entirely possible the fruits of the island will live on.

Apple’s Spin on A.I. and iPadOS Multitasking ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai has a good roundup of commentary about Apple’s post-WWDC media spin, adding:

I’ll just repeat that I have almost no interest in the next-generation Siri features. I just want Apple to make the basic stuff — announced back when Steve Jobs was still alive — fast and reliable. Apple never seems to talk about this, and nobody asks them.

I would also like to know if the revised Siri architecture will be able to handle common basic tasks, or if that will take yet another fifteen years and a couple redesigns. It will be extremely funny if I can soon ask Siri when my mom’s flight arrives and it is able to find the information buried in some email or iMessage, but it still unable to stop the only active timer.

The United States Keeps Hitting Snooze on the Emergency TikTok Ban ⇥ techdirt.com

Alex Leary, Wall Street Journal:

President Trump is planning to give TikTok another lifeline.

With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.

It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.

One way to view this is as an indictment of the supposed urgency of this law. Another is through the lens of this increasingly lawless administration.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.

I know most every country has flexible interpretations of law enforcement, and this all occurs on a scale. I know this has been the case for past U.S. presidents; I, too, have read Chomsky. But the actions of this administration are sliding further on that scale toward a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Kicking the can down the road on the divest-or-ban requirements of this law is just as much a part of that story as the rest of the hostile domestic and foreign acts so far undertaken by this president.

The Long Road to the iPad’s ‘Mac-Like Multitasking’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, of Ars Technica, also got to interview Craig Federighi, though he focused on the iPad multitasking announcements instead of Siri delays:

“We decided this time: make everything we can make available,” said Federighi, “even if it has some nuances on older hardware, because we saw so much demand [for Stage Manager].”

That slight change in approach, combined with other behind-the-scenes optimizations, makes the new multitasking model more widely compatible than Stage Manager is. There are still limits on those devices—not to the number of windows you can open, but to how many of those windows can be active and up-to-date at once. And true multi-monitor support would remain the purview of the faster, more-expensive models.

“We have discovered many, many optimizations,” Federighi said. “We re-architected our windowing system and we re-architected the way that we manage background tasks, background processing, that enabled us to squeeze more out of other devices than we were able to do at the time we introduced Stage Manager.”

Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.

Even if there is no real swapping in iPadOS 26, I hope this indicates tabs can linger for longer in the background. The ability to juggle multiple tasks without requiring reloading information is a bare minimum requirement for “Mac-like multitasking” in my view. I look forward to finding out from reviewers if this has been accomplished.

Apple Insists It Had a Working Version of Personalized Siri Features Last Year ⇥ techradar.com

Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak found time to chat with a few journalists and media personalities this week. Both sat down for video interviews with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal and Mark Spoonauer and Lance Ulanoff from Future U.S. publications, while Federighi alone spoke with Justine Ezarik.

Ulanoff, of TechRadar, quoting Federighi:

“We found that when we were developing this feature that we had, really, two phases, two versions of the ultimate architecture that we were going to create,” he explained. “Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it. We thought by December, and if not, we figured by spring, until we announced it as part of WWDC. Because we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of, ‘What’s Apple thinking about the implications of Apple intelligence and where is it going?'”

As Apple was working on a V1 of the Siri architecture, it was also working on what Federighi called V2, “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”

Federighi insisted Apple had a functioning, working version of the “V1” architecture that really could do the complex things it showed in its feature presentation at WWDC last year, but it apparently did not work well enough. Federighi said they have the “V2” version working today, too — but was not interested in providing a demo of either version, nor commit to a date more specific than “2026”. This is a message it was careful to reinforce in other interviews.

I can understand why Apple would want to dispel the idea that it never had a truly functional version of this software. Joswiak, speaking to Stern, said “there’s this narrative out there that … it was demoware only. No […]”. From a user’s perspective, however, this is a distinction without a difference, relying almost entirely on the fuzzy boundary between software that works only for the purpose of a single filmed demo, and software that works so poorly as to effectively be the same. But putting this on the record will be important as Apple prepares to defend itself over allegations of false advertising. That is, I think, who this statement is for — not for me, you, the public at large — but for itself and, by extension, its shareholders.

A.I. Slop Squatters ⇥ 404media.co

Samantha Cole, 404 Media:

On the vaccines.gov domain, topics for spam blogs include “Gay Impregnation,” “Gay Firry[sic] Porn,” and “Planes in Top Gun.”

The same AI spam farm operation has also targeted the American Council on Education’s site, Stanford, NPR, and a subdomain of vaccines.gov. Each of the sites have slightly different names — on Stanford’s site it’s called “AceNet Hub”; on NPR.org “Form Generation Hub” took over a domain that seems to be abandoned by the station’s “Generation Listen” project from 2014. On the vaccines.gov site it’s “Seymore Insights.” All of these sites are in varying states of useability. They all contain spam articles with the byline “Ashley,” with the same black and white headshot.

Andy Baio:

Several people have asked how this happened, and I’m not 100% sure! Almost every subdomain points to different EC2 IP addresses in AWS’s us-west-1 and us-west-2 regions, and each one hosts a WordPress installation with different content, but the same author and similar templates. Here’s my list. https://docs.google.com/…

I found a bunch of affected sites not on Baio’s list by searching the web for “term of use” “ashley” “minutes read”. Western Digital got hit hard. On one, I found a link back to a GitHub account by the name of pgpump containing some interesting and relevant repos. The key word “arsae” also turned up a few similar-looking scripts in other users’ repos, and a PHP script by the same name. I am not the right person to try to figure this out, but whoever is behind this appears to be continuing as their most recent commits happened last week.

Update: “Marshall Banana” in the 404 article comments points to a likely reason for the varied and high-profile spam hosting: dangling DNS entries.

Cycling Directions Have Expanded Across Canada in Apple Maps

Apple has made no announcement that can find about a significant expansion in the availability of cycling directions across Canada, but I thought it was worth noting here because it impacts me personally. I need no other excuse.

As of yesterday, Apple’s iOS feature page indicated Canadian cycling directions were only available in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver. The list has grown substantially today, adding:

  • Austria

  • Belgium

  • Denmark

  • Finland

  • Greece

  • Ireland

  • Italy

  • Monaco, because I guess even tax-dodging billionaires sometimes hop on their bikes, too

  • Netherlands

  • New Zealand

  • Norway

  • Portugal

  • San Marino

  • Singapore

  • Sweden

  • Switzerland

  • Thailand

  • Vatican City

In addition, three places were upgraded from availability in specific cities to, apparently, whole-country directions:

  • Canada

  • Spain

  • United Kingdom

Some of this expansion may truly be new, but it seems to me this page is merely catching up. For example, it only now includes the Netherlands, where cycling directions have been available for a year. The expansion to Calgary was noticed on 4 April by Reddit user drinkyourwaterbitch. I cannot recall receiving an in-app notification of this change which arrives just in time for cycling season here.

I cannot speak to anywhere else but, in my testing, Canadian availability is broad. Coverage includes not only larger cities like Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Victoria, and Winnipeg, but also smaller towns, and even Northern Canada. It also includes rural routes. I was able to get cycling directions within Iqaluit, and between Inuvik and Squamish. Eight-and-a-half days straight, if you are wondering, with a total climb of 70,200 metres.

More practically, the cycling directions within Calgary seem, overall, pretty good. Without changing any settings, Maps sometimes chooses different routes than I would take. On a ride I am familiar with, Maps auto-selected a 51-minute, 13-kilometre path instead of one it says takes 42 minutes over 11 kilometres, the main difference being a 100 metre climb compared to 150 metres. Yet, with a different destination, Maps selected a ride that takes three minutes longer and requires a greater amount of climbing, but is shorter. Both appear to have a similar mix of roads and bike lanes, so I am not sure what to make of this.

I also tried putting in a route to a pharmacy with a particularly excellent selection of coffee beans and other dry goods. Instead of putting me on the protected bike lane on Edmonton Trail, visible from the Look Around imagery, it suggests a route on Fourth Street — which is a one-way road in the opposite direction. The step-by-step directions suggest there is a cycle lane along Fourth Street but I can assure you there is not — I checked. Google Maps gets it right.

Canadian cyclists like myself can rejoice at having much greater coverage that takes into account our unique needs. At last, we can make an informed decision about how we can get to a store that, upon arrival, we find is closed because the listed hours are wrong. It is still Apple Maps, after all.

I am truly happy to have cycling directions here.

Kudos to Jon Prosser ⇥ youtube.com

I am not sure what the exchange rate is for Being Right Points to dollars, but I think Jon Prosser should be able to exchange his for a new hoodie, at least.

In January, Prosser showed a preview of the new Camera app, and suggested it was representative of broader iOS changes. That was followed up with a more comprehensive video in March, a couple of weeks after Mark Gurman reported system redesigns were in the works across the board. After Prosser’s video, Gurman tweeted the mockups were not “representative of what we’ll see at WWDC”.

So Prosser responded with a lot more details — the vast majority of which have proved correct. Toggles are indeed pill-shaped; there are glassy accents on icons, the Dock, and on Notification Centre controls, all of which respond to the phone’s physical orientation; there are plenty of fluid animations that feel similar to the Dynamic Island.

Prosser’s one big whiff was in his prediction of much more rounded icons on the home screen — not quite circular, but dramatically more curved than those seen in previous iOS versions. While the corner radius does appear to my eyes to be a little greater than it was in iOS 18, it is not to the extent Prosser’s Front Page Tech channel mocked up.

Anyway, if you are keeping score, Gurman gets a few points for saying there would be significant changes across all of Apple’s operating systems, and that it would pitch this as a play for consistency. But Prosser was the one who accurately showed iOS 26’s visual updates, and gets the glory.

Apple Updated Its Human Interface Guidelines for Liquid Glass ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple:

Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world. Its colour is informed by surrounding content and intelligently adapts between light and dark environments. Born out of a close collaboration between the design and engineering teams, Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and dynamically reacts to movement with specular highlights. This creates a lively experience that makes using iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV even more delightful.

There is guidance on using Liquid Glass in the Materials section of the updated Human Interface Guidelines, and information for designers and developers deeper in its updated documentation. Of note:

App icons take on a design that’s dynamic and expressive. Updates to the icon grid result in a standardized iconography that’s visually consistent across devices and concentric with hardware and other elements across the system. App icons now contain layers, which dynamically respond to lighting and other visual effects the system provides. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all now offer default (light), dark, clear, and tinted appearance variants, empowering people to personalize the look and feel of their Home Screen.

Designers or developers can create these layered icons with a new app called Icon Composer.

Like every year, I have been a big dummy and have installed the iOS beta on day one on my only iPhone. This is a very stupid thing to do. But try to stop me from playing around with Notification Centre’s Liquid Glass sheet. It is tremendous fun — truly the kind of thing that is difficult to replicate or appreciate without using it directly.

Whether it fixes my biggest bugbear is an different question.

Apple ‘Fandom’ in 2025

Dan Moren ended his “Stay Foolish” column at Macworld with a tremendous essay about what it means to be a “fan” of Apple or its products in 2025:

Over the years, those in the Apple community have long been called everything from the liturgical “Apple faithful” to the insipid “iSheep”, dating back to the days when the prevailing wisdom was that to hitch your fortunes to this weird company must imply a cult-like devotion. The simple truth was that most customers were simply fans of the products themselves: they liked the way they worked and looked.

That hasn’t changed for me: I continue to be a fan of Apple’s products. But as Apple started becoming more and more successful, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that one should ever really consider oneself a “fan” of a company.

On the eve of WWDC and, with it, the kicking-off of Apple’s coming year, I found myself thinking about this column published in April.

There was a time when rooting for Apple and calling oneself a “fan” seemed to make sense. The things it designed and sold had a clear ethos that gave me an impression of the kind of effortless confidence that only comes from a massive amount of effort. The business model felt like a simple exchange — as Steve Jobs said at D8, “we want to make the best products in the world for our customers. If we succeed they’ll buy them, and if we don’t they won’t”.

That era — the Jobs era, the simplistic worldview era, and the clear ethos era — is behind us. I am not saying Apple now takes everything for granted; I am sure it has teams of people working hard all day long to make improvements. But it is a corporate behemoth that cannot move quickly. Regardless of how cool its rumoured “Liquid Glass” visual refresh may be, I have a difficult time believing it will radically alter the way we use our devices. There are 2.35 billion devices on users’ wrists, in their hands and bags, and on their desks. At least a billion of them are iPhones. So, even though it is a bit exciting to be on the verge of something new and different, I do not think it will be that new and different, lest Apple alienate a huge number of people. It will look different enough, and that looks like progress — and maybe it will actually represent progress, too.

Visual interface changes aside, the expectations for this year’s WWDC do not seem to be high. We are still waiting on last year’s most impressive Apple Intelligence features, and the Vision Pro is a nascent device in the hands of few. The ideas factory is sputtering a little. But the money factory remains strong.

I am enmeshed in the Apple ecosystem so, in some ways, it should be exciting the company has to try a little harder. I am not. I do not think anyone expects Apple will sell dramatically fewer iPhones this year, nor will it lose subscribers to services, its increasingly important recurring revenue printer. Apple was a more interesting company when it could not be certain its customers would buy more stuff. I hope, after the Vision Pro’s release, it is also understanding it cannot take its developer base for granted, either.

Every time I use the Windows 11 computer on my desk at work, I am reminded of why I use MacOS. I still prefer it. But the post-P.C. device era has encouraged some nasty habits at Apple that have, consequently, made it one of the world’s most valuable businesses.

Apple has all the money it could ever want. It sells some very good products. But its size has smothered the fire it seemed to have, and dulled its edge. There are still risky bets it could make, but all of them are necessarily softened by its critical position in the world’s economy and in retirement plans. I see no reason to be a fan of that kind of company, even if you — as I — still appreciate many of the products and services it delivers. I am, as ever, looking forward to seeing what is being announced tomorrow, albeit with the understanding I will be watching a slick infomercial possibly containing concept videos. It is hard to see how one could be a fan of a multi-trillion-dollar company. I am just a customer, like a billion-plus others.

The Analysis Group Won an Industry Award in 2022 for Its ‘Sham’ App Store Report ⇥ prnewswire.com

Speaking of the Analysis Group, here is a press release from 2022:

Analysis Group was acknowledged at the GCR [Global Competition Review] awards ceremony for its work on Epic Games v. Apple, which was awarded “Matter of the Year” and “Litigation of the Year – non-cartel defence.” The litigation involved allegations that anti-steering provisions contained in Apple’s App Store policies for developers stifled competition.

And here is an article by Tripp Mickle, New York Times, from last month:

Judge Gonzalez Rogers questioned whether Apple was telling the truth and asked the company to provide documents about its plans. It produced 89,000 documents but claimed a third of them were confidential. The court said those claims were “unsubstantiated” and forced Apple to turn over more than half of the documents.

The documents made clear that Mr. Roman had lied under oath, that the Analysis Group report was a “sham” and that Apple had “willfully” disregarded a court order, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said. She called it a “cover-up.”

I wonder if the Analysis Group is giving back that award. I also wonder if that matters in the eyes of industry groups like the Global Competition Review.

Apple Publishes Its Latest Analysis Group App Store Report ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Apple:

Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024, according to a new study by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Dr. Jessica Burley from Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The purpose of this study — also produced in 2020, 2021, and 2023, though not last year — is two-fold. First, it indicates to lawmakers the footprint of the App Store and suggests any further regulatory action would seriously compromise the economy as a whole. The second reason it exists is to soften the impression of Apple’s commission on digital purchases, hence this part of the study and press release, emphasis mine:

The new study by Professor Fradkin and Dr. Burley highlights how developers on the App Store have more ways than ever to monetize their apps. The study found that in 2024, developer billings and sales for digital goods and services totalled $131 billion, driven by games, photo and video editing apps, and enterprise tools. Sales of physical goods and services exceeded $1 trillion, fuelled by rising demand for online food delivery and pickup, as well as grocery orders. In-app advertising revenue from ads placed by developers in their apps was $150 billion.

A big amount, but measured against the total estimated economy of $1.3 trillion, it is supposed to be seen as a small fraction — “less than 10%”. This number is, the study’s authors write, not an estimate of payments made through In-App Purchases:

Sales from digital goods and services purchased elsewhere but used on apps on Apple devices are included, while billings from in-app purchases made via the App Store but used elsewhere are excluded.

I do not understand why this definition was chosen. Surely the excluded sales are actually a better example of transactions “facilitated by the App Store ecosystem”, even if the purchase is ultimately consumed elsewhere. But, then again, I cannot think of many things I can buy with In-App Purchases which I ultimately use outside the app, so perhaps it does not make much difference if they had been included. It may be the result of a methodological gap in the study.

The study’s authors still conclude Apple takes a commission on “less than 10%” of $1.295 trillion. If this number was closer to 1%, the report would probably say that. It is perhaps a touch unfair, but let us assume it is about 10%, which happens to be just shy of the $131 billion in total digital billings. Apple’s commission is not as straightforward as the flat 30% rate it used to charge. But, at its minimum 15% rate, this suggests Apple made at least $19.4 billion in 2024 in App Store commissions alone — from what the Analysis Group says is less than 10% of an economic ecosystem facilitated by the App Store.

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve always been baffled about why a small minority of developers, including small indie developers like me, are required to finance the App Store ecosystem for every developer, including the developers of “free” apps that nonetheless generate billions of dollars per year from billings and sales. Why is Apple’s IAP not required for all purchases in all App Store apps? It’s difficult for me to see a principled distinction between the apps that have to use Apple IAP and the apps that don’t. It seems completely arbitrary. Apple made a big deal about Spotify not making “contributions to that marketplace,” yet Apple also openly (and hypocritically) admits that most of the financial transactions that occur in App Store apps are not contributing to that marketplace either. There are a lot of “free riders” in the App Store.

The thing about the Analysis Group’s report is that it is very broad. While it does not include transactions made through Safari on iOS, things like shopping in Amazon’s app or buying airfare in Kayak’s app are factored in. Whether these purchases were actually facilitated by the App Store ecosystem is questionable to me — would someone have not bought that flight if not for their iPhone?

Where this gets especially murky is with the whole economic world that is dependent on smartphones. The classic example of this is Uber. Taxis have existed for a long time, and so have pirate taxis, and you could always ask your friend to carpool, and you can take a bus. But the structure of Uber, which relies on an app each for customers and drivers, would not exist without the App Store. Yet Uber is not required to use In-App Purchases, nor does Apple collect any commission on its business. A similar argument could be made about social apps like Instagram and TikTok, which are also smartphone-dependent, yet are funded by ads Apple does not get a cut of — mostly.

Apple has argued in court this commission is for App Store upkeep, developer relations, API development, and for intellectual property licensing. These are things common to all apps. Yet only those facilitating transactions for digital services are expected to pay? How is Uber — with its half-gigabyte client app updated once or twice weekly for tens of millions of users — not paying for App Store hosting and bandwidth, but indie developers are?

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The Sad Story of the Long-Promised 3 GHz Power Mac G5 ⇥ 512pixels.net

With just a few days to go until WWDC, Stephen Hackett chronicled the history of the mythical 3 GHz Power Mac G5, previewed at the conference over twenty years ago:

The heat generated by the G5 would become an issue later on, but first we need to talk about Steve Jobs broke a fundamental rule of Apple:

We don’t comment on future products.

The Power Mac G5 was before my time as a Mac user, but I remember the otherworldly impression it made on me. I am no Mac historian, but it still feels to me like it began a distinct era of flagship Macs that were both powerful and relatively accessible — the inflation-adjusted price of the best G5 spec, without build-to-order upgrades, is nearly $2,000 less than the base price of today’s Mac Pro.

Microsoft Redesigns Office Portal to Prioritize Copilot ⇥ reddit.com

I, like millions of people, spend a good chunk of my Mondays through Fridays in Microsoft 365 (formerly Office) applications, many of which I partly or wholly access through a browser. For years, I could just type portal.office.com in my browser and get links to Word, Excel, Outlook — all the classics — plus some organization-specific applications.

Microsoft being Microsoft, it has decided to bury all that. We are in the artificial intelligence era now, baby. Instead of seeing the applications millions of people rely on, Microsoft has decided the default view should be a Copilot chat. The familiar suite of apps is in another page accessible from the sidebar; each app can, at least, be pinned to that same sidebar. This was barely announced and seems to have taken many by surprise.

But, hey, Copilot should at least make me more productive, right? It is Microsoft’s own service — albeit backed by OpenAI’s work — and integrated, in theory, with our organization’s applications and files. Maybe it could function as an application launcher. So I told Copilot to “launch Word”. Copilot:

I can’t directly launch Microsoft Word from here, but I can help you open it on your device. Here’s how you can do it:

On Windows:

  1. Press the Windows key on your keyboard or click the Start menu.

  2. Type “Word” in the search bar.

  3. Click on Microsoft Word from the search results.

On macOS:

  1. Open Finder or press Command + Space to open Spotlight Search.

  2. Type “Word” and press Enter when Microsoft Word appears.

Truly embarrassing stuff to interrupt users’ learned workflow for something worse because it is important for Microsoft to be seen as a cutting-edge innovator. It has made Copilot part of its branding — so much so that it will advertise Copilot even where it is not available, for “consistency”.