Their exploration of future fossils has led [Prof. Sarah] Gabbott and [Prof. Jan] Zalasiewicz to draw some conclusions. One is that understanding how human detritus could become fossils points towards how best to stop waste piling up in the environment.
“In the making of fossils, it’s the first few years, decades, centuries and millennia which are really crucial,” says Zalasiewicz. “This overlaps with the time in which we have the capacity to do something about it.”
Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040.
It is disconcerting to understand our evidence of civilization accumulated over the span of many tens of thousands of years, yet we have equalized that within just a few decades. We are converting so much of the matter on this planet into things we care about for only a few minutes to a few years, but their mark will last forever.
Gabbott and Zalasiewicz’s book “Discarded” is out now. I hope my local library stocks it soon.
That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI it’s fallen flat on its face. This is a concern.
The Vision Pro shipped as promised and works as advertised. But it’s also both too heavy and bulky and far too expensive to be a viable mass-market consumer product. Hugo Barra called it an over-engineered developer kit — you could also call it an experiment, or a preview or a concept. […]
The main problem, I think, with the reception of the Vision Pro is that it was passed through the same marketing lens as Apple uses to frame all its products. I have no idea if Apple considers the sales of this experiment acceptable, the tepid developer adoption predictable, or the skeptical press understandable. However, if you believe the math on display production and estimated sales figures, they more-or-less match.
Of course, as Evans points out, Apple does not ship experiments:
The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. […]
However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.
Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.
Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.
[…]
Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence. He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product.
If you had no context for this decision, it looks like Rockwell is being moved off Apple’s hot new product and onto a piece of software that perennially disappoints. It looks like a demotion. That is how badly Siri needs a shakeup.
Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.
I figured as much. Gurman does not clarify in this article how much of Apple Intelligence falls under Giannandrea’s rubric, and how much is part of the “Siri” stuff that is being transferred to Rockwell. It does not sound as though Giannandrea will have no further Apple Intelligence responsibilities — yet — but the high-profile public-facing stuff is now overseen by Rockwell and, ultimately, Craig Federighi.
There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much of our life coalesces around devices which are so restrictive compared to those which came before.
Recall Apple’s “digital hub” strategy. The Mac would not only connect to hardware like digital cameras and music players; the software Apple made for it would empower people to do something great with those photos and videos and their music.
The iPhone repositioned that in two ways. First, the introduction of iCloud was a way to “demote” the Mac to a device at an equivalent level to everything else. Second, and just as importantly, is how it converged all that third-party hardware into a single device: it is the digital camera, the camcorder, and the music player. As a result, its hub-iness comes mostly in the form of software. If a developer can assume the existence of particular hardware components, they have extraordinary latitude to build on top of that. However, because Apple exercises control over this software ecosystem, it limits its breadth.
Like the Mac of 2001, it is also a hub for accessories — these days, things like headphones and smartwatches. Apple happens to make examples of both. You can still connect third-party devices — but they are limited.
I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared – there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.
Even if you believe Apple is doing this not out of anticompetitive verve, but instead for reasons of privacy, security, API support, and any number of other qualities, it still sucks. What it means is that Apple is mostly competing against itself, particularly in smartwatches. (Third-party Bluetooth headphones, like the ones I have, mostly work fine.)
The European Commission announced guidance today for improving third-party connectivity with iOS. Apple is, of course, miserable about this. I am curious to see the real-world results, particularly as the more dire predictions of permitting third-party app distribution have — shockingly — not materialized.
Imagine how much more interesting this ecosystem could be if there were substantial support across “host” platforms.
In my last post, ‘RCS Now in iOS: a New Chapter for Mobile Messaging‘, I celebrated the integration of Rich Communication Services (RCS) with Apple’s iOS 18, a culmination of years of collaboration across mobile operators, device manufacturers, and technology providers. Today, I am pleased to announce the next milestone: the availability of new GSMA specifications for RCS that include end-to-end encryption (E2EE) based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol.
The GSMA has published a separate specification (PDF) for end-to-end encryption, distinct from that of RCS itself.
Google announced its support for MLS in 2023, though it is still building integration with Google Messages. Apple has also committed to the updated spec. This is great news. It made sense to wait until encryption was part of the official spec.
Speaking of which, the spec says (PDF) that if both parties have enabled end-to-end encryption and a message cannot be delivered over RCS, carriers will not fall back to SMS. This helps answer one part of the main question I have, which is how all of this will be differentiated to users now that there will be three standards: SMS, RCS, and end-to-end encrypted RCS. Also, because this is carrier dependent, I suspect the rollout of end-to-end encryption will be a little rocky for a beat and, in some countries, never made available.
Constantine Anastasakis, of Dribbble, a portfolio hosting site for designers that also has a job board and, as of last year, serves as an intermediary between designers and clients:
Since Week 36 of last year, the total value of transactions processed through our marketplace (GMV) has grown by an average of 15% week-over-week (without any paid marketing). As transaction activity has increased, we’ve been able to commit more resources (including engineering, moderation, and customer support), accelerating growth and generating more revenue for our designers and, in turn, for Dribbble: […]
On the one hand, this early traction has exceeded our expectations and validated the decision to undertake a business model transformation after fifteen years of operation. On the other hand, it only represents a fraction of the transaction activity that’s actually occurring between our users because some take payments off-platform (also known as “disintermediation” or “circumvention”).
[…]
Today, we’re instituting a new policy that requires clients and designers who meet on Dribbble to keep payments on Dribbble.
Dribbble, of course, collects a portion of every project’s fee.
I have not used Dribbble in ages, but I got an email today advising me that I must remove all my contact details — like my social media handles and website — from my profile and any posted work, or Dribbble would do it for me beginning in April. I must say, it seems quite odd for a platform to look at the App Store and Apple’s resulting relationship with developers and see it as something to emulate. If the response I have seen elsewhere is any indication, this is going to go over about as well.
A Canadian retail icon is on its last legs as Hudson’s Bay Company plans to liquidate its entire business by June, with the process starting as early as next week.
This is a 350-year-old retailer that has been hollowed out in the span of less than twenty years by some private equity vultures. Yet another sad entry in a long list of businesses bought, stripped of all remaining value advantaging only some over-rich vampires, and leaving long-time employees and customers with nothing.
Here’s the thing about pre-recorded videos: it’s way easier to market features via concept videos rather than true demos.
Sure, live demos can also be faked to fool an audience too.
But the Siri presentation was able to get a pass because highly edited videos make it easy for Apple to show something off that isn’t anywhere near ready.
Would any of this happened during the live keynote era? Sure, Apple had to contend with the many issues of prototype iPhones for the Macworld 2007 presentation — there were lots of iPhones onstage because memory management was so poor that Jobs would likely need to switch units several times, and the network connectivity was fudged to work more reliably. But it was real. The presentation contained a picture-in-picture feed of a camera set up over Jobs’ shoulder so that everyone could see he was doing everything live.
Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024 contained none of that. It is not even clear to me which demos, not just Apple Intelligence, use real screen recordings — whether recorded for real or, more likely, masked onto devices in post — and which are could be mockups. (Update: I edited this because, true enough, I do not even know if Apple shows anything that is in a purely mockup state. I assume it does — but these boundaries are entirely unclear.)
Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.
Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.
Based on my experience in an Apple Store this week, this disappointment has not trickled down to retail employees. I was in for an appointment after I shattered my fifteen year record of keeping my screen intact, and I was told that even though my iPhone 15 Pro was “fine” because it supports Apple Intelligence, I could get nearly $700 towards a newer one after I had mine repaired. This was something I should at least consider, apparently. And, by the way, had I tried the new Apple Intelligence features? They are pretty great, right, especially automatic replies and Proofreading?
At least Walker apparently demonstrated unreleased Siri features during this meeting, showing this is not vapourware.
As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That decision could theoretically change at any time. In any case, the company is poised to make management adjustments. It has discussed moving more senior executives under Giannandrea to assist with a turnaround effort. Already, the company tapped longtime executive Kim Vorrath — seen as a project fixer — to assist the group.
I find this a fascinating little paragraph. The first sentence feels almost like a controlled leak — after all, how many sources could be familiar with Apple’s executive-level staffing decisions? I think it sends a message that is good for Apple, which is that it currently has confidence in the existing team to complete this work. If it instead made changes “immediately”, it would imply this project is in an even worse state.
The second sentence is just a waste of words.
The rest of the paragraph is an expansion on the “immediately” qualifier. While everything is stable right now, things might change when the dust has settled. I have no interest in calling for anyone’s termination, but none of the rank-and-file engineers made the call to show it at WWDC and make it central to the new iPhone’s marketing campaign. The scale of this failure is the fault of executives and managers.
Instead of worrying about “wait, not like that”, I think we need to reframe the conversation to “wait, not only like that” or “wait, not in ways that threaten open access itself”. The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.
This is such a terrific and thoughtful essay. I am suspicious of using more aggressive intellectual property laws to contain artificial intelligence companies, but there is a clear power imbalance between individuals and the businesses helping themselves to their — oh, who am I kidding? Our — work in bulk.
Canadian Sovereignty, Digital and Geographic
In just about every discussion concerning TikTok’s ability to operate within the United States, including my own, two areas of concern are cited: users’ data privacy, and the manipulation of public opinion through its feeds by a hostile foreign power. Regarding the first, the U.S., Canada, and any other country is not serious about the mishandling of private information unless it passes comprehensive data privacy legislation, so we can ignore that for now. The latter argument, however, merited my writing thousands of words in that single article. So let me dig into it again from a different angle.
In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.
Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.
I do not know where Zuckerberg got his “six of the top ten” number. The closest I could find was five — based solely on total user accounts. Regardless of the actual number, Zuckerberg was correct to say Chinese internet companies have been growing at a remarkable rate, but it is a little misleading; aside from TikTok, these apps mostly remain a domestic phenomenon. WeChat’s user base, for example, is almost entirely within China, though it is growing internationally as one example of China’s “Digital Silk Road” initiative.
Tech companies from the U.S. still reign supreme nearly everywhere, however. The country exports the most popular social networks, messaging services, search engines, A.I. products, CDNs, and operating systems. Administration after administration has recognized the value to the U.S. of boosting the industry for domestic and foreign policy purposes. It has been a soft power masterstroke for decades.
In normal circumstances, this is moderately concerning for those of us in the rest of the world. Policies set in the U.S. — either those set by companies because of cultural biases or, in the case of something like privacy or antitrust, legal understanding — may not reflect expectations in other regions, and it is not ideal that so much of modern life depends so heavily on the actions of a single country.
These are not normal circumstances — especially here, in Canada. The president of the U.S. is deliberately weakening the Canadian economy in an attempt to force us to cede our sovereignty. Earlier this week, while he was using his extraordinary platform to boost the price of Tesla shares, the president reiterated this argument while also talking about increasing the size of the U.S. military. This is apparently all one big joke in a broadly similar way as is pushing a live chicken into oncoming traffic. Many people have wasted many hours and words trying to understand why he is so focused on this fifty-first state nonsense — our vast natural resources, perhaps, or the potential for polar trade routes because of warming caused by those vast natural resources. But this is someone whose thoughts, in the words of David Brooks, “are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar”. He said why he wants Canada in that Tesla infomercial. “When you take away that [border] and you look at that beautiful formation,” he said while gesticulating with his hands in a shape unlike the combined area of Canada and the United States but quite like how someone of his vibe might crassly describe a woman’s body, “there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that”. We are nothing more than a big piece of land, and he would like to take it.
Someone — I believe it was Musk, standing just beside him — then reminded him of how he wants Greenland, too, which put a smile on his face as he said “if you add Greenland […] it’s gonna look beautiful”. In the Oval Office yesterday, he sat beside NATO’s Mark Rutte and said “we have a couple of [military] bases on Greenland already”, and “maybe you will see more and more soldiers go there, I don’t know”. It is all just a big, funny joke, from a superpower with the world’s best-funded military, overseen by a chaotic idiot. Ha ha ha.
The U.S. has become a hostile foreign power to Canada and, so, we should explore its dominance in technology under the same criteria as it has China’s purported control over TikTok and how that has impacted U.S. sovereignty. If, for instance, it makes sense to be concerned about the obligation of Chinese companies to reflect ruling party ideology, it is perhaps more worrisome U.S. tech companies are lining upto do sovoluntarily. They have a choice.
Similarly, should we be suspicious that our Instagram feeds and Google searches are being tilted in a pro-U.S. direction? I am certain one could construct a study similar to those indicating a pro-China bias on TikTok (PDF) with U.S. platforms. Is YouTube pushing politically divisive videos to Canadians in an effort to weaken our country? Is Facebook suggesting pro-U.S. A.I. slop to Canadians something more than algorithmic noise?
This is before considering Elon Musk who, as both a special government employee and owner of X, is more directly controlling than Chinese officials are speculated to be over TikTok. X has become a solitary case study in state influence over social media. Are the feeds of Canadian users being manipulated? Is his platform a quasi-official propaganda outlet?
Without evidence, these ideas all strike me as conspiracy-brained nonsense. I imagine one could find just as much to support these ideas as is found in those TikTok studies, a majority of which observe the effects of select searches. The Network Contagion one (PDF), linked earlier, is emblematic of these kinds of reports, about which I wrote last year referencing two other examples — one written for the Australian government, and a previous Network Contagion report:
The authors of the Australian report conducted a limited quasi-study comparing results for certain topics on TikTok to results on other social networks like Instagram and YouTube, again finding a handful of topics which favoured the government line. But there was no consistent pattern, either. Search results for “China military” on Instagram were, according to the authors, “generally flattering”, and X searches for “PLA” scarcely returned unfavourable posts. Yet results on TikTok for “China human rights”, “Tianamen”, and “Uyghur” were overwhelmingly critical of Chinese official positions.
The Network Contagion Research Institute published its own report in December 2023, similarly finding disparities between the total number of posts with specific hashtags — like #DalaiLama and #TiananmenSquare — on TikTok and Instagram. However, the study contained some pretty fundamental errors, as pointed out by — and I cannot believe I am citing these losers — the Cato Institute. The study’s authors compared total lifetime posts on each social network and, while they say they expect 1.5–2.0× the posts on Instagram because of its larger user base, they do not factor in how many of those posts could have existed before TikTok was even launched. Furthermore, they assume similar cultures and a similar use of hashtags on each app. But even benign hashtags have ridiculous differences in how often they are used on each platform. There are, as of writing, 55.3 million posts tagged “#ThrowbackThursday” on Instagram compared to 390,000 on TikTok, a ratio of 141:1. If #ThrowbackThursday were part of this study, the disparity on the two platforms would rank similarly to #Tiananmen, one of the greatest in the Institute’s report.
The problem with most of these complaints, as their authors acknowledge, is that there is a known input and a perceived output, but there are oh-so-many unknown variables in the middle. It is impossible to know how much of what we see is a product of intentional censorship, unintentional biases, bugs, side effects of other decisions, or a desire to cultivate a less stressful and more saccharine environment for users. […]
The more recent Network Contagion study is perhaps even less reliable. It comprises a similar exploration of search results, and surveys comparing TikTok users’ views to those of non-users. In the first case, the researchers only assessed four search terms: Tibet, Tiananmen, Uyghur, and Xinjiang. TikTok’s search results produced the fewest examples of “anti-China sentiment” in comparison with Instagram and YouTube, but the actual outcomes were not consistent. Results for “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” on TikTok were mostly irrelevant; on YouTube, however, nearly half of a user’s journey would show videos supportive of China for both queries. Results for “Tibet” were much more likely to be “anti-China” on Instagram than the other platforms, though similarly “pro-China” as TikTok.
These queries are obviously sensitive in China, and I have no problem believing TikTok may be altering search results. But this study, like the others I have read, is not at all compelling if you start picking it apart. For the “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” examples, researchers say the heavily “pro-China” results on YouTube are thanks to “pro-CCP media assets” and “official or semi-official CCP media sources” uploading loads of popular videos with a positive spin. Sometimes, TikTok is more likely to show irrelevant results; at other times, it shows “neutral” videos, which the researchers say are things like unbiased news footage. In some cases — as with results for “Tiananmen” and “Uyghur” — TikTok was similarly likely to show “pro-China” and “anti-China” results. The researchers hand-wave away these mixed outcomes by arguing “the TikTok search algorithm systematically suppresses undesirable anti-China content while flooding search results with irrelevant content”. Yet the researchers document no effort to compare the results of these search terms with anything else — controversial or politically sensitive terms outside China, for example, or terms which result in overwhelmingly dour results, or generic apolitical terms. In all cases, TikTok returns more irrelevant results than the other platforms; maybe it is just bad at search. We do not know because we have nothing to compare it to. Again, I have no problem believing TikTok may be suppressing results, but this study does not convince me it is uniformly reflecting official Chinese government lines.
As for the survey results, they show TikTok users had more favourable views of China as a travel destination and were less concerned about its human rights abuses. This could plausibly be explained by TikTok users skewing younger and, therefore, growing up seeing a much wealthier China than older generations. Younger people might simply beless aware of human rights abuses. For contrast, people who do not use TikTok are probably more likely to have negative views of China — not just because they are more likely to be older, but because they are suspicious of the platform. “When controlling for age,” the researchers say, “TikTok use significantly and uniquely predicted more positive perceptions of China’s human rights record” among video-based platforms, but Facebook users also had more positive perceptions, and nobody is claiming Facebook is in the bag for China. Perhaps there are other reasons — but they go unexplored.
This is a long digression, but it indicates to me just how possible it would be to create a similar understanding for social media’s impact on Canada. In my own experience on YouTube — admittedly different from a typical experience because I turned off video history — the Related Videos on just about everything I watch are packed with recommendations for Fox News, channels dedicated to people getting “owned”, and pro-Trump videos. I do not think YouTube is trying to sway me into a pro-American worldview and shed my critical thinking skills, but one could produce a compelling argument for it.
This is something we are going to need to pay an increasing level of attention toward. People formerly with Canadian intelligence are convinced the U.S. president is doing to Canada in public what so many before him have done to fair-weather friends in private. They believe his destabilization efforts may be supported by a propaganda strategy, particularly on Musk’s X. These efforts may not be unique to social media, either. Postmedia, the publisher of the National Post plus the most popular daily newspapers in nearly every major Canadian city, is majority U.S.-owned. This is not good.
Yet we should not treat social platforms the same as we do media organizations. We should welcome foreign-owned publications to cover our country, but the ownership of our most popular outlets should be primarily domestic. The internet does not work like that — for both good and bad — nor should we expect it to. Requiring Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. social media companies or banning them outright would continue the ongoing splintering of internet services with little benefit for Canadians or, indeed, the expectations of the internet. We should take a greater lead in determining our digital future without being so hostile to foreign services. That means things like favouring protocols over platforms, which give users more choice over their experience, and permit a level of autonomy and portability. It means ensuring a level of digital sovereignty with our most sensitive data.
It is also a reminder to question the quality of automated recommendations and search results. We do not know how any of them work — companies like Google often cite third-party manipulation as a reason to keep them secret — and I do not know that people would believe tech companies if they were more transparent in their methodology. To wit, digital advertisements often have a button or menu item explaining why you are seeing that particular ad, but it has not stopped many people from believing their conversations are picked up by a device’s microphone and used for targeting. If TikTok released the source for its recommendations engine, would anyone trust it? How about if Meta did the same for its products? I doubt it; nobody believes these companies anyway.
The tech industry is facing declining public trust. The United States’ reputation is sinking among allies and its domestic support for civil rights is in freefall. Its leader is waging economic war on the country where I live. CEOs lack specific values and are following the shifting tides. Yet our world relies on technologies almost entirely dependent on the stability of the U.S., which is currently in short supply. The U.S., as Paris Marx wrote, “needs to know that it cannot dominate the tech economy all on its own, and that the people of the world will no longer accept being subject to the whims of its dominant internet and tech companies”. The internet is a near-miraculous global phenomenon. Restricting companies based on their country of origin is not an effective way to correct this imbalance. But we should not bend to U.S. might, either. It is, after all, just one country of many. The rest of the world should encourage it to meet us at our level.
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John Gruber wrote an appropriately scathing piece about Apple’s inability to deliver improvements to Siri. It is a much needed perspective from someone who receives press briefings and demos, and is therefore able to better gauge Apple’s likely progress on these features. It is not looking good:
We didn’t get to try any of the Apple Intelligence features ourselves. There was no Apple Intelligence “hands on”. But we did see a bunch of features demoed, live, by Apple folks. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.
But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. Those features encompass three main things: […]
There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.
Those are personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions. As Gruber astutely broke down the existing Apple Intelligence features by their degree of reality, I think it is worth picking apart these three, even though Apple is lumping them together under the “more personalized Siri” banner.
The first of these was described by Craig Federighi at the Talk Show Live as comprising data already indexed by Spotlight.1 If this is accurate, that now-pulled commercial in which Bella Ramsey asks Siri “what’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” seems entirely plausible. I can search my phone for a location — say, my barber’s shop — and Spotlight will return previous appointments there. If I ask Siri the same thing, it converts the name of the shop to an address but it cannot find any events past or future, for some reason. (This is true of all types of appointments I tried. I have an upcoming Apple Store appointment and, while it interpreted me correctly when I asked it for upcoming appointments at the store, it could not find one in my calendar.) It is not news that Siri is bad, but there is a kernel of this functionality already present in Siri. It needs to be able to search past appointments, convert “a couple of months ago” into a reasonable date span, and then connect it to other attendees in the event — but all of this is based on data already indexed.
Onscreen awareness and in-app actions both seem far more ambitious. The former is not nearly as dependent on new third-party developer support in the way in-app actions would be. Simon Willison speculates the holdup could be related to security concerns. Gruber assumes — fairly — none of these features work properly. Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press. While Apple included the “mom’s flight” example in the keynote, it has — thankfully — not shown an ad with anything nearly so complex.
If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown. The best case, right now, is that some of these features work, but only some of the time. Yet Apple decided it could present all of them way too early. We can no longer assume Apple’s WWDC presentation is a reflection of reality, nor that its public roadmap is anything more than words on a page — not until someone outside of Apple can say they have seen this work. I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.
Mind you, this is the same interview in which John Giannandrea says the first thing he told the Siri team is “failure is not an option”. ↥︎
From a letter (PDF) sent by five U.S. lawmakers, linked from a press release issued by Sen. Ron Wyden:
The U.K.’s attempted gag has already restricted U.S. companies from engaging in speech that is constitutionally protected under U.S. law and necessary for ongoing Congressional oversight. Apple has informed Congress that had it received a technical capabilities notice, it would be barred by U.K. law from telling Congress whether or not it received such a notice from the U.K., as the press has reported. Google also recently told Senator Wyden’s office that, if it had received a technical capabilities notice, it would be prohibited from disclosing that fact. The U.K. embassy has also not responded to a recent request from Senator Wyden’s office regarding potential demands from the U.K. to other U.S. companies.
If Google had not received a technical capabilities notice, it would be able to simply say “no”. Because it says it cannot say anything “if it had”, it seems likely it has also been issued a similar demand for access to user data in a decrypted form.
Scroll through Instagram for a few minutes, and you’ll be swamped by a parade of sponsored posts promising extraordinary wealth through minimal effort: “PDF farming” generating €25,000 monthly, rebranded ebooks yielding “$4230 in a month,” or selling “thousands of books without writing them.”
These aren’t fringe scams hiding in the shadowy corners of the Internet.
They’re algorithmically amplified, professionally produced advertisements popping up in millions of feeds daily.
This appears to be an updated version of an old scam. Previously, as Dan Olson documented, you would scrape together the ingredients of a “book” from various gig economy servant platforms and, theoretically, sell it through Amazon and its “best-kept secret” Audible. This market is, as Westenberg writes, entirely saturated. So why bother paying people or taking any risk whatsoever when you can just generate every component? A.I. makes a get-rich-quick scheme more efficient. But it still will not work.
Cryptocurrency and related topics have been something of a magnet for deceptive behavior, so it’s not surprising to see an Amazon search for “cryptocurrency” bring up a sponsored listing for a book series by an author with a GAN-generated face. Authors with synthetically generated face images have been an issue on Amazon for some time now, and some of them have served up potentially lethal AI-generated culinary advice. In the case of the sponsored cryptocurrency books, the alleged author is one of a group of three authors with GAN-generated faces published by the same alleged publishing company, Tigress Publishing.
I have previously described Amazon as a “low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store”. That now seems like high praise. In the five years since I wrote that, it has descended to feeling like one is picking through a scrap heap of products confiscated by customs agents for being dangerous, knockoffs, or stolen.
Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad and Mac for a new generation of users.
The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons.
To state a couple of obvious things: first, this is a rumour and should only be treated as such; second, it seems to me the justifications laid out in this article are Gurman’s interpretation, not necessarily descriptive of the actual design. There is no indication Gurman has seen what it will look like.
Gurman’s explanation, though his own, certainly passes my sniff test:
A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another.
This is the same thing said by Alan Dye in introducing MacOS Big Sur’s overhaul less than five years ago: “we wanted consistency throughout the ecosystem, so users can move fluidly between their Apple devices”. I do not think this is a worthwhile goal unto itself. It is unclear to me how today’s Apple operating systems are insufficiently consistent in ways that are not beneficial to the user experience. I do not think MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS should all look and work the same because they are all used in completely different ways.
This is also not the first time this rumour has shown up. Last February, Israeli publication the Verifier reported this design was due for iOS 18 — right idea, wrong timeline. Then, in January, Jon Prosser showed a mockup of what he said was the Camera app in iOS 19, saying it “would be weird to just exist there […] in one place. We could be looking at a full redesign”. There is a building expectation for this on iOS and, by extension, iPadOS. Gurman is reporting the same treatment is due for MacOS, too.
This has me excited and worried in similar measure. There are things on all of these products which could use rethinking. This could be the culmination of many years of rethinking every component and interaction to figure out what works best. But I do not think it is worth getting too hopeful for a rethink or even a reintroduction of depth and texture across Apple’s systems. This set of redesigns may be described here as “dramatic” but, given the number of users who depend on these operating systems, I doubt it will be. I do not think much re-learning will be expected, despite Gurman’s belief this will “go well beyond a new coat of paint like iOS 7”.
I am trying not to get too far in my thoughts until I see it for real, but I do not like the sound of more glassy, translucent effects. One of the most common phrases I have used in recent years of filing Apple bug reports is “insufficient contrast”. I am not optimistic that pattern will not continue.
Wait, what? By using #Firefox, I now grant Mozilla “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use” any data I “upload or input”? That seems, uhm, rather broad. Wtf.
Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. […]
This is the same thing Adobe did. It’s not great to put the key information in what is essentially a FAQ that doesn’t seem as legally binding as a ToS. And the clarification says that they can only use the data as described in the Privacy Notice, while the actual Terms of Service say that that Mozilla gets “all rights necessary” including using it as described in the Privacy Notice. So it seems like the Privacy Notice cannot constrain their behavior, but they want us to think it does.
After fielding user backlash over its new Terms of Use last week, Firefox browser maker Mozilla has rewritten its policy to address issues around the overly broad language it had previously used. Critics said the terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input into the browser or upload, which some worried would be then sold to advertisers or AI companies.
I find Mozilla’s explanations for these changes sufficient, but I also understand why users were worried. The document said what it said. I do not see Mozilla saying these interpretations were legally incorrect. Like Tsai, I also thought first of Adobe’s terms of use update — another entry in a long list of spooky boilerplate permissive language in a contract.
Since the launch of the first DMA browser choice screens on iOS in March 2024, people are making themselves heard: Firefox daily active users in Germany alone have increased by 99%. And in France, Firefox’s daily active users on iOS grew by 111%.
I have confirmed with Petrova these numbers reflect growth in iOS users only. They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
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Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.
[…]
Google’s argument isn’t new, and it has previously raised these concerns in public in response to antitrust pressure from regulators and lawmakers. But the company is re-upping the issue in discussions with officials at the department under Trump because the case is in its second stage, known as the “remedy” phase, during which the court can impose sweeping changes on Google’s business.
The government’s 2024 request also sought to have Google’s investment in AI firms curtailed even though this isn’t directly related to search. If, like Google, you believe leadership in AI is important to the future of the world, limiting its investments could also affect national security. But in November, Mehta suggested he was open to considering AI remedies because “the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines” is rapidly shifting the search market.
The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday dropped a proposal to force Alphabet’s Google to sell its investments in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI competitor Anthropic, to boost competition in online search.
[…]
Many of the measures prosecutors proposed in November remain intact with a few tweaks.
For example, a requirement that Google share search query data with competitors now says that Google can charge a marginal fee for access and that the competitors must not pose a national security risk.
The Department of Justice included in its filings today a version of the proposed judgement with revisions shown (PDF). Google’s proposed judgement (PDF) is, rather predictably, much shorter. It sounds like its national security arguments swayed the prosecution, however.
Earlier today, in reacting to the news of delayed Siri updates, I noted Mark Gurman had recently reported these features could be released in May, but I doubted it. It turns out I could have been more up-to-date if I had bothered to refresh his author page at Bloomberg.
Bloomberg News reported on Feb. 14 that Apple was struggling to finish developing the features and the enhancements would be postponed until at least May — when iOS 18.5 is due to arrive. Since then, Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.
Take this with a grain of salt, of course — these could be pessimistic engineers ranting in Gurman’s direct messages, for all we know — but it does seem to match the tone of the statement. Maybe these features come in an early iOS 19 build. Probably, though, they get dragged out to one of the updates next year after Apple — again, according to Gurman’s reporting — may rebuild the features as part of new Siri architecture.
One more little thing, courtesy Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.
The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.
Nice.
Apple Confirms Delayed Launch of Personalized Siri Features
Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement provided seemingly first to both Stephen Nellis, of Reuters, and John Gruber:
[…] We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.
Unsurprisingly, this news comes on a Friday and is announced via a carefully circulated statement instead of on Apple’s own website. It is a single feature, but it is a high-priority one showcased in its celebrity infused ads for its flagship iPhone models. I think Apple ought to have published its own news instead of relying on other outlets to do its dirty work, but it fits a pattern. It happened with AirPods and again with AirPower; the former has become wildly successful, while the latter was canned.
This announcement reflects rumours of the feature’s fraught development. Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in February:
The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.
Do note how “or later” is doing the bulk of the work in this paragraph. Nevertheless, he seems to have forecasted the delay announced today.
While it is possible to reconcile Apple’s “coming year” timeline with Gurman’s May-or-later availability while staying within the current release cycle, the statement is a tacit acknowledgement these features are now slated for the next major versions of Apple’s operating system, perhaps no sooner than a release early next year. I do not see why Apple would have issued this statement if it were confident it could ship personalized Siri before September’s new releases. That is a long time between marketing and release for any company, and particularly so for Apple.
This is a risk of announcing something before it is ready, something the WWDC keynote is increasingly filled with. Instead of monolithic September releases with occasional tweaks throughout the year, Apple adopted a more incremental strategy. I would like to believe this has made Apple’s software more polished — or, less charitably, slowed its quality decline. What it has actually done is turn Apple’s big annual software presentation into a series of promises to be fulfilled throughout the year. To its credit, it has almost always delivered and, so, it has been easy to assume the hot streak will continue. This is a good reminder we should treat anything not yet shipping in a release or beta build as a potential feature only.
The delay may ultimately be good news. It is better for Apple to ship features that work well than it is to get things out the door quickly. Investors do not seem bothered; try spotting the point on today’s chart when Gruber and Reuters published the statements they received. And, anyway, most Apple Intelligence features released so far seem rushed and faulty. I would not want to see more of the same. Siri has little reputation to lose, so it makes sense to get this round of changes more right than not.
Besides, Apple only just began including the necessary APIs in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.4. No matter when Apple gets this out, the expansiveness of its functionality is dependent on third-party buy-in. There was a time when developer adoption of new features was a given. That is no longer the case.
According to Gurman as recently as earlier this week, a May release is possible (Update: Oops, I should have checked again.), but I would bet against it. If his reporting is to be believed, however, the key features announced as delayed today require a wholly different architecture which Apple was planning on merging with the existing Siri infrastructure midway through the iOS 19 cycle. It seems possible to me the timeline on both projects could now be interlinked. After all, why not? It is not like Siri is getting worse. No rush.
The Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region (TRF-1) has overturned a trial ruling and reinstated an injunction imposed by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) on Apple, as part of an investigation into alleged abuse of dominant position in the app distribution market for iOS devices. According to the ruling, the company will have 90 days to implement the changes mandated by the antitrust authority.
Under the previous ruling, overturned in December, Apple had just twenty days to comply. The judge said the new timeline is reasonable given both the “fast-paced dynamic of the technology market” and:
“Apple has already complied with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model,” the judge pointed out. “The implementation of structural changes in operating systems, indeed, requires some planning and technical development, which may demand more time than stipulated in the administrative decision,” he considered in the ruling.
The rules are changing worldwide. Apple can make this easy for itself, or it can tediously lose its fights one country at a time.
Given recent turbulent events and the diminishing trust between Canada and the U.S., it is entirely possible that Washington would seek enhanced access to sensitive Canadian data, notably including financial and health data. This data could be invaluable for developing AI algorithms, for instance, a current priority of the Trump administration.
[…]
Mandated data localization requirements would be an important policy response from Canada. While the end goal would be to establish viable Canadian-controlled cloud services ready to compete with U.S. giants, this may be a way off. An interim measure would involve further beefing up Canadian privacy law by ensuring that Canadian health data is encrypted, resides on servers in Canada and is subject to serious penalties for non-consensual disclosures.
I remain steadfastly opposed to trusting the U.S. government with data about non-U.S. citizens. There are some cases where it offers increased protections, but many where it is a risk — now increasing.
Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”
What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.
I am considerably less optimistic than Ingram. Digg has been relaunched a few times — first as a curated link aggregator, then as a web magazine, with a detour for building a Google Reader-like RSS client. Under BuySellAds, it appeared to fill a Buzzfeed-like best-of-the-web role.
Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.
The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.
I imagine this will continue to ebb and flow over time. The vast majority of people still congregate on closed platforms that are begrudgingly loosening their hold thanks to legislative efforts, mostly in Europe. But there does seem to be growing discontent and mistrust.
The province says the flat rate for wine is going up another 15 cents per 750 ml bottle.
And it’s creating a new ad valorem, or “value added” fee, that will go up as the price of wine goes up, on top of the flat fee.
For example, according to the province, a $25 750 ml bottle of wine will cost another 20 to 40 cents, but a $50 750 ml bottle of wine will cost anywhere from $2.80 to $3.25 more.
This was announced to retailers with basically no warning. The province is using the wholesale per-litre price to assess this additional levy, meaning a standard 750 mL bottle of wine costing over $11.25 from a distributor is considered “high value”. Based on the wholesale prices I have seen from one importer, that would include the vast majority of wine from our neighbours in British Columbia, at a time when they need support after last year’s cold snap.
This is not my usual beat here, but I wanted to highlight some local lies, emphasis mine:
“Changes to the liquor markup system were undertaken with the objective of minimizing the impact to Alberta consumers and support social responsibility as they ensure products with a higher content of alcohol are subject to higher markup rates,” said Brandon Aboultaif, press secretary to the Service Albert and Red Tape Reduction Minister, Dale Nally.
This is nonsense. The markup rate for spirits with 22–60% alcohol by volume, which comprises virtually all “hard” liquor on store shelves, remains identical for major producers and, for qualifying “small manufacturers”, has been reduced (PDF) compared to the previous rates (PDF). The government, according to Underwood, says this wine-specific tax is intended to “address industry concerns, improve equity within the system, and support the growth of Alberta’s liquor manufacturing industry”. Alberta does not have a wine industry; it does, however, make a lot of beer and spirits. What this sounds like, in part, is that wine drinkers are seen as snooty cosmopolitain types, not like good old-fashioned beer and whisky drinkers.
I have little problem in principle with taxing my vices or, say, increasing other taxes to pay for stuff. That is understandable. But I do not appreciate being lied to.
The Association for Computing Machinery which — and this is not, strictly speaking, important — ought to have a way cooler logo than it actually does:
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning—one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems.
Barto is Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutton is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies, and a Fellow at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute).
The University of Alberta has a good summary of Sutton’s contributions to the field’s development internationally and in this province. Great things can happen when people work together across borders.
Tapbots, the makers of Mastodon client Ivory, announced today that they are working on a Bluesky client. The app, which will be called Phoenix, is planned for release this summer.
I have been begging for a decent Bluesky client for MacOS. This looks promising. And, if it has the same system requirements as Ivory, it means I will be able to run it on my ageing Intel iMac. Truly miraculous.
Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.
The introduction of the M3 Ultra, for which Apple issued an entirely separate press release, is a curious twist. Every other Mac available today updated in the past year uses the M4 generation, mostly because Apple makes essentially two computers: consumer Macs — the iMac, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini — and its more “pro” Macs, with the M chip architecture generally shared across each these lines. You can quibble with my oversimplification — there is one M4 Pro configuration available for the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro now starts with the no-suffix M4 — but it is correct enough to make it conspicuous that the Mac Pro, the Studio’s architectural sibling, was not updated today.
When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.
This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra — if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors.
Seeing the Studio updated today instead of at WWDC gave me hope for a radical Mac Pro update in June. Apple’s statement to Cunningham makes me think that might not be coming.
According to some in the Hacker News discussion of the problem, something else that can count as suspicious – other than using niche browsers or OSes – is something as simple as asking for a URL unaccompanied by any referrer IDs. To us, that sounds like a user with good security measures that block tracking, but it seems that, to the CDN merchant, this looks like an alert to an action that isn’t operated by a human.
Making matters worse, Cloudflare tech support is aimed at its corporate customers, and there seems to be no direct way for non-paying users to report issues other than the community forums. The number of repeated posts suggests to us that the company isn’t monitoring these for reports of problems.
The more privacy you want on the open web, the more cumbersome it becomes. There are reasons for this — every website is being constantly scraped for A.I. training, mining contact data, and generally abusing the social contract of public access. Administrators, understandably, want to limit the amount of automated traffic. To do so, they depend on tools from the same handful of companies as everyone else. And, if you have taken steps to improve your privacy online, your traffic looks abnormal, which is apparently suspicious.
The open web is becoming ever more complicated. You must frequently confirm your humanity. Google now requires JavaScript just to search, since it is also apparently trying to combat bots and scrapers. Everything, even viewing a relatively basic document, feels degraded unless you abandon control over your experience either on the web or in an app.
Apple is taking legal action to try to overturn a demand made by the UK government to view its customers’ private data if required.
The BBC understands that the US technology giant has appealed to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court with the power to investigate claims against the Security Service.
Neither the BBC nor the Financial Times, which broke this news, has any details about the appeal, presumably because nobody can talk about this in public through official channels. According to both reports, it is possible this whole thing will be conducted in secret, too.
It looks like I, by way of Mike Masnick, was wrong to believe the only grounds on which Apple could fight this are financial. It turns out there is an appeals process which I could have found at any time — and in even more detail (PDF) — if I had double-checked. That is on me. However, in the first four years appeals were permitted on legal grounds, just two cases (PDF) were heard, with one being dismissed.
The way this is playing out is farcical. Nobody is legally permitted to discuss it, so we have only on-background leaks from Apple (almost certainly, I am guessing) and U.K. intelligence (maybe) to the same handful of reporters. This has advantages for both parties since they can craft a narrative through limited disclosures, but it means the rest of us can only speculate about how long Apple will be permitted to offer uncompromised end-to-end encryption worldwide.
A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Taken together, the two stories raised alarms that the policy changes would have a drastic impact on U.S. national security and make the country more vulnerable to cyberattacks from Vladimir Putin’s hackers. The Record noted that the order to Cyber Command provided “evidence of the White House’s efforts to normalize ties with Moscow,” and the Guardian quoted a source who said that the change at CISA represented a win for Russia. “Putin is on the inside now,” the source told the Guardian.
Although a number of people on social media seem to believe The Record story corroborates The Guardian story (I won’t call anyone out here), the two stories are reporting different things and are based on different sources.
[…]
I’ll first parse what the two stories said and didn’t say and then look at what has changed since they published.
We all know that reporting during a breaking news cycle is going to contain inaccuracies. When it is the policy of the U.S. government to set in motion a series of these cycles on a seemingly daily basis, it is difficult to get a handle on anything. I appreciate Zetter’s more careful reading and verification with her sources. If you want a better idea of what is — and is not — known about the U.S. cybersecurity posture regarding Russia, her analysis is the one to read.
People love to quote the third of Arthur C. Clark’s laws — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And almost always with a positive spin. The Disneyfied language makes it sound wondrous. But let’s reconsider the quote with a different word:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft.
This is far from the first article aligning new technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — with magical thinking. Just searching some related keywords yields at least threeacademicpapers, plus loadsofarticleswithsimilarframing. Some include this same Clarke quote for obvious reasons.
Monahan, though, ties it to a broader social condition in which magical thinking is on the rise, and there is something to think about in this. I am not necessarily in agreement — I think this is more of an interesting exercise in language than it is describing a broader trend — but I have also just finished reading “If It Sounds Like a Quack” and, so, my head might be in a funny space.
The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November that there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.
But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters.
There are only two reasons I can see for Biden officials to omit this from their report: first because it was not, in November, a current dispute but a potential future one; and, second, it understood it could not talk about it. Neither seems justifiable.
Donald Trump has lashed out at the UK’s demand for Apple to grant secret access to its most secure cloud storage system, comparing the move to “something … that you hear about with China”.
[…]
Earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, said any move to force Apple to build a back door into its systems would cause “grave concern” as an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy. Gabbard said she had ordered lawyers and intelligence officials to investigate the matter.
It is amazing to see this particularly despicable U.S. administration arguing for the correct position given its history. To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard is less of a surprise; though she now apparently supports U.S. surveillance programmes, she has a history of questioning privacy overreaches. But the first Trump administration was not at all friendly to end-to-end encryption. According to Menn, then at Reuters, the FBI tried to pressure Apple to kill its plans for end-to-end encryption in iCloud, a feature which would ultimately be launched – in 2022 – as Advanced Data Protection. In 2019, the U.S. was exploring whether it could ban end-to-end encryption entirely and, in 2020, was a co-signatory on a multilateral statement requesting a backdoor as policy.
Thankfully, none of the more extreme U.S. positions on end-to-end encryption has become law. And, while the U.S. is among many in opposing end-to-end encryption, there have been no reports of it compelling service providers to do what the U.K. government is expecting of Apple, though Menn reports the FBI has tried. That is not to say the U.S. would not issue a mandate, nor that we would find out about it. The PRISM program was a backdoor into tech company data maintained secretly for six years before its existence was revealed by Edward Snowden, while Yahoo built (maybe?) a way for it to search users’ email accounts after being compelled of the U.S. government. I do not think anyone should expect ideological or principled consistency from the Trump administration on this matter. There is a history of U.S. officials making these kinds of demands.
Maybe there is a third reason Biden officials did not want to notify Congress after all.
While streaming platforms flatten music-listening into a homogenous assortment of vibes, listening to an album you’ve downloaded on Bandcamp or receiving a mix from a friend feels more like forging a connection with artists and people. As a musician, I’d much rather have people listen to my music this way. Having people download your music for free on Soulseek is still considered a badge of honor in my producer/dj circles.
I don’t expect everyone to read this and immediately go back to hoarding mp3s, nor do I think many people will abandon things like Spotify and Amazon Kindle completely. It’s not like I’m some model citizen either: I share a YouTube Premium account because the ads make me want to die, and I will admit having a weakness for the Criterion Channel. But the packrat lifestyle has shown me that other ways are possible, and that at the end of the day, the only things we can trust to always be there are the things we can hold in our hands and copy without restriction.
Yes — a thousand times, yes. These are all effective ways of embracing art. One can stream and buy music, just as one can see movies in theatres and on a phone while sitting on a train. I am not saying the latter is as enjoyable, but I do not think the people involved in making “Twisters” will very much mind.
But I think you should have local copies of the stuff you like. None of these third-party services promise availability. In fact, their legal terms say they are provided on an “as-is” basis, and explicitly deny a warranty of “satisfactory quality” or any “obligation to provide specific content”. The service providers will try, of course, but they cannot make guarantees. Your local, backed-up music library, though? That will almost certainly work.
Inclusive Sans is a new typeface from Olivia King that puts accessibility at the forefront. It’s arisen from the type designer’s research into typographic accessibility and readability – from highly regarded traditional guides and papers to more modern approaches to letterform legibility. “A few years ago, I was working on branding projects in the disability and government sectors, where accessibility was always a big focus,” Olivia tells It’s Nice That. Olivia wanted to take things a step further, however, and she and her colleague, Jo Roca, began to explore typographic accessibility at the character level rather than through the typeface as a whole.
Inclusive Sans is a free download through Google Fonts. Via a Brand New case study, I also learned about Atkinson Hyperlegible from the Braille Institute of America. Both are not only reflecting more inclusive principles, they are also quite nice examples of type design.
If you’re in one of the 9 million organizations that use Google Workspace, your company likely just received notice that it’ll have to fork over a lot more cash to use its ubiquitous office applications.The monthly price for business plans is jumping 16 percent, from $14.40 to $16.80. If all 3 billion Google Workspace users paid that standard increase, that would equal an additional $7.2 billion in monthly revenue for the company. At the same time, Google’s cloud division, which houses Workspace, slashed its workforce this week, though the exact number of staff layoffs is unknown.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Companies like Microsoft and Google invest billions of dollars in fundamental research (which is good!), but their marketing departments (whom I suspect don’t understand quantum computing either) can’t help but search for user benefits for their announcements. The result is cognitive dissonance — it’s hard to imagine these companies’ quantum products solving the world’s ills when Google users complain about the quality of search results and Microsoft users frequently swear at Teams and OneDrive. Meanwhile, university labs that make significant strides in quantum computing rarely make it into mainstream tech news.
I think the marketing of these inventions is most of what tripped me up. If you divorce the consumer-type sales pitches from Google, Microsoft, and now Amazon from the likely uses for these computers, it seems to make more sense. Think of them in the realm of a supercomputer or, as Engst writes, the “mainframes of the future”. If they work — if — the distance between them and the effects you and I may feel is going to be vast.
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Also, Safari is technically competent. It’s fast enough, and (unlike even a very few years ago) compatible with wherever I go. The number of Chome-only sites, thank goodness, seems to be declining rapidly.
So, a tip o’ the hat to the Safari team, they’re mostly giving me what I need. But there are irritants.
I am sure there are people who will gripe with Bray’s description of Safari as “technically competent” because of all the APIs it does not support. I will not because I cannot remember the last time I needed to open a page in a Chromium-based browser for compatibility reasons.
I do share Bray’s frustrations with Safari’s odd tab behaviour, though. There are a few peculiar circumstances in which links will open in a new window instead of a tab, and when pressing ⌘–W will close a window instead of a single tab. The first of these things happens if you have a dialog box open or if you are using Tab Groups. I am not sure about the second but it has happened to me.
Bray:
I humbly suggest … that Safari do these things:
[…]
Don’t just exit on ⌘-Q. Chrome gets this right, offering an option where I have to hold that key combo down for a second or two.
I disagree. I think Chrome’s nonstandard behaviour is confusing and unexpected. But I do think Safari should offer users a chance to reconsider instead of immediately quitting, especially since the Q and W keys are next to each other. A user’s open tabs are kind of like an unsaved document, except there is no guarantee those same links will work upon relaunch. Sometimes a paywall will be triggered, or a website could be down. I have therefore mapped “Quit” in Safari to ⌘–⌥–Q.
But, on the subject of Tab Groups, I find myself accidentally switching to them more often than I would like. This is because rotating between them is mapped to ⌘–⌥–[ and ⌘–⌥–]. Notice I did not write “by default”, and that is because there is no way to change this shortcut key combination. I have tried; according to Safari, the shortcuts for “Go to Previous Tab Group” and “Go to Next Tab Group” are the ones I have set. Yet, for some reason, Safari still responds to the shortcut keys Apple has apparently hardcoded.
I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app.
I agree, but I think it is a worse situation than that suggests. Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, but its existence also causes regressions on the open web.
Stories in Apple News have a permalink, like anything else on the web. However, unlike just about any link you have seen from a mainstream publication for the past, say, twenty years, these links are inscrutable. Instead of being in a format containing the source of an article and its title, all Apple News permalinks are something like https://apple.news/Ayls8UZCzQnWfFNRugL3tPA.
That is not only gross, it is also unhelpful. Sometimes, but not always, links like these display a page containing nothing but the following:
Open this story in Apple News.
For the best reading experience, open this story on a device with Apple News. It may also be available on the publisher’s website.
There is no link to the article — certainly not on the publisher’s website, but also not even on Apple News. In MacOS browsers, I am prompted to open Apple News to view the article; if I decline, I have no next steps.
There is scant indication of what article this is. The <title> element of the page shows the article’s headline, but the publisher is not visible. (It is, however, contained in the page’s markup, along with a description of the article.) This is true no matter which user agent I use. I tried it with a couple of automated webpage testing tools and got the exact same page.
This article is, of course, also available on the web. I chose it essentially by chance from plentiful options. Apple could make next steps visible on this page, but it does not, and never has since Apple News launched ten years ago this September.
Update: As Bill Bennett reminds me, these links are even worse in regions without Apple News availability.
Too often now, in matters meaningful and meaningless, the good stuff is reserved for people who have smartphones or other digital tools. From parking garages to airplane movie offerings, it pays to be digitally equipped. More to the point, it hurts to be in the technological slow lane.
“It’s the tyranny of the apps,” says Ron Delnevo, the chair of the campaign committee at lobby group the Payment Choice Alliance. “In this country we’re being treated like sheep,” he says. “We’re always being told there’s no alternative.” But when a new smartphone can set you back hundreds of pounds, it is “an expensive passport to participate”, Delnevo says.
According to the latest data from the telecoms regulator Ofcom, 8% of people aged 16 or over do not have a smartphone, which for the UK translates into just under 4.5 million people. Among those aged 75-plus, the proportion is said to be 28%. Add in all those who don’t or can’t use apps and the total number of people affected is a lot bigger.
Yet another example of how being poor can cost more. If you do not have enough money for a smartphone, you might be locked out of discounts for basic goods. My local supermarket is currently offering a dollar off eggs if I use my personalized coupon — but it is only available in the app.
Even for those of us with smartphones — a majority of people in Canada in all under-75 age groups, for example — we might not want to install software to get grocery coupons or park their car. These apps are often clunky experience, and seem to usually be a website in an app wrapper. Web apps are not treated as mainstream citizens on iOS, in particular, so these bad apps are all we get. Loyalty programs have long been mechanisms for collecting more data about customers, though, so it is little surprise they are going smartphone-first or –only.
Apple today announced a series of child safety enhancements in the form of a PDF document which, so far as I can tell, is not listed anywhere on its website. The company is developing a habit of sending PDF links directly to media outlets to circulate. Among the forthcoming features is an API to confirm a user’s age range.
Apple historically has pushed for third-party app developers to verify kids’ ages, while large tech companies like Meta havelobbied that app store operators should handle age verification as they have this information about their users already.
The iPhone maker’s new solution is something of a compromise. It puts Apple in the position of collecting kids’ ages via parental input but still puts the onus on the third-party developer to extract and use this information to craft age-appropriate experiences in their own apps.
A predictable and, I think, correct outcome. I was wrong about it being a device-level feature, but it makes complete sense for age verification to be part of a child’s Apple Account information instead of collected individually by third-party apps. On the fifth page of the PDF, Apple explains why it has been reluctant to be a gatekeeper in this instance:
Requiring age verification at the app marketplace level is not data minimization. While only a fraction of apps on the App Store may require age verification, all users would have to hand over their sensitive personally identifying information to us — regardless of whether they actually want to use one of these limited set of apps. That means giving us data like a driver’s license, passport, or national identification number (such as a Social Security number), even if we don’t need it. And because many kids in the U.S. don’t have government-issued IDs, parents in the U.S. will have to provide even more sensitive documentation just to allow their child to access apps meant for children. That’s not in the interest of user safety or privacy.
This is a direct response to a proposed U.S. law that would require Apple — and Google — to verify ages at the App Store level; it says its solution is an effective alternative. It may well be, but I do not buy this line of argument. It could, for example, wait to verify a user’s age until they attempt to download an app where it would be needed. Also, while Apple’s own data collection would be minimized by hypothetically offloading that responsibility onto third-parties, it would increase the number of copies of this sensitive information floating around. Put it this way: if you had the choice of verifying your age with Apple one time, or needed to send that documentation individually to Bluesky, Meta, X, and other third-party developers, which would you choose? I think even the most reticent iPhone user would pick a one-time Apple validation.
Riley Testut is optimistic this API will be available in third-party app marketplaces. I hope that is the case.
Amazon on Wednesday showed off Alexa+, a generative AI version of its digital voice assistant that draws on a variety of models and works with many of the company’s older Echo devices.
[…]
Alexa+ will work with a number of service partners, including GrubHub, OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Yelp, Thumbtack, Vagaro, Fodor’s, TripAdvisor, Uber, Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and Max.
These voice-controlled assistants seem like a natural fit for large language models and, if Amazon’s ad is anything to go by, this looks impressive. Something I think about a lot is an accessibility spectrum I first saw from Microsoft. I am not someone with a permanent physical disability, for example, but I cook often and do not want to touch my phone. Voice controls are a situational boon.
But there is no part of me that would ever want Alexa or any other voice-controlled assistant buying tickets to a show, or booking a vacation rental, or even buying groceries. Not a single cell in me trusts it with transactions.
Today, we’re excited to introduce Alexa+, our next-generation assistant powered by generative AI. Alexa+ is more conversational, smarter, personalized — and she helps you get things done. She keeps you entertained, helps you learn, keeps you organized, summarizes complex topics, and can converse about virtually anything. Alexa+ can manage and protect your home, make reservations, and help you track, discover, and enjoy new artists. She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. Alexa+ does all this and more — all you have to do is ask.
It is still so damn weird that Amazon refers to Alexa as “she”.
“It is shocking that for years after receiving reports of sexual assault, Hinge continued to allow Stephen Matthews access to its platforms and actively facilitated his abuse,” said Laura Wolf, the attorney representing the woman whose police report led to the arrest. Following best practices for reporting on sexual assault, the Dating Apps Reporting Project is honoring survivors’ requests for anonymity. Matthews’ attorney, Douglas Cohen, declined to comment. A letter that The Dating Apps Reporting Project sent directly to Matthews in jail went unanswered.
Match Group’s reach is so massive — its mission is “to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide” — that people are more likely to meet through its apps than out at the bars, at church, or through friends.
This is, in part, a problem of platform moderation at scale — but the Match Group choosing to scale beyond the capabilities of what it is willing to manually moderate is a self-created problem.
Most of the dating apps you can name are likely part of the Match Group, which includes Hinge, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Tinder, and Match itself. The sad irony of the breadth of Match’s offerings is that it has enormous power when it is presented with evidence of abuse. If you start poking around the web for guides to evade these bans, you will find plenty of people who swear up and down they were kicked off one or more Match Group products for no good reason. I am sure some of them are lying — perhaps most. Some are probably telling the truth, though, because moderation is hard. Again, it is the platform’s choice to scale.
In the context of dating apps, it is best to err on the side of being a little ban-happy. And, if there is a pattern of abuse — as there was in the case profiled in this article — I cannot think of a good reason why someone would not be reported to authorities.
Jeff Bezos published an email he sent to Washington Post staff on, of all places, X, though it was covered by the Post itself without a byline:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
Bezos’s exercise of greater control over the Post’s journalism in recent months has raised eyebrows. Last fall, a number of prominent Post writers and alumni criticized Bezos for preventing the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, writing in an op-ed that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and “create a perception of bias.
An endorsement might be sen as biased, but what about a million-dollar donation plus another million in-kind? That is just business.
And how about the internet taking the place of a “broad-based opinion section”?
Hadas Gold and Joe Pompeo, Politico, in 2017, after the New York Times announced it would no longer have a public editor:
That’s the direction the Times is going in — letting the public serve as the public editor, a position created at the Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003.
“[T]oday, our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office,” Sulzberger said in the memo. […]
The way this has played out since is by allowing the Times’ publisher to frame criticism originating on social media as largely unserious, and to avoid engaging with it. The Post would like to take a similar position with its opinion section: the pieces it publishes are nominally serious works by serious commentators, and they should only concern themselves with serious topics like defending capitalism and personal freedoms. If you want to have a conflicting opinion or would like to write about something else, start a blog, dummy.
Bezos:
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
I know what you are thinking: finally, a media outlet dedicated to defending free markets. Sure, there are three cable television channels in the United States broadcasting nothing but business news, plus another two — Cheddar and Schwab Network — primarily or exclusively online. And, yes, the second most popular newspaper in the United States — ahead of the Post — is named after its business hub. Sure, the Post itself publishes a daily business section. Explaining and defending the annals of capitalism is a primary function of the mainstream press. But what if you finish all of that output and remain hungry for more? Bezos has got your back.
Coverage of news and opinion about “personal liberties”, in the broadest but still reasonable definition, is arguably more saturated, encompassing everything from technological privacy to LGBTQ rights, from actual speech to fake money-as-speech. “Underserved”? Hardly. Advocating for the criticism and shaming of public figures for actions hostile to personal liberties is just as much a support of those freedoms as is defending those actions. If you are looking for people to scold progressive activism while minimizing people with real power, the Atlantic is chockablock full of those takes. I wonder which way the Post will go.
The latest craze in Facebook generative AI spam: cooking pages with tons of vaguely surreal artificially generated images of food.
I am not sure about “latest”, but this genre of A.I. slop seems to be increasing in volume to the extent even I have noticed on the open web. I find it repulsive for three reasons: first, developing recipes is difficult and, like many of the other creative practices mimicked by A.I., it deserves more credit than it gets; second, the results may be dangerous and nobody is incentivized to provide quality control; and, third, it is a depressing mimic of a fundamentally human practice.
For years, chefs on YouTube and TikTok have staged cook-offs between “real” and AI recipes — where the “real” chefs often prevail. In 2022, Tasty compared a chocolate cake recipe generated by GPT-3 with one developed by a professional food writer. While the AI recipe baked up fine, the food writer’s recipe won in a blind taste test. The tasters preferred the food writer’s cake because it had a more nuanced, not-too-sweet flavor profile and a denser, moister crumb compared to the AI cake, which was sweeter and drier.
AI recipes can be dangerous too. Last year, Forbes reported that one AI recipe generator produced a recipe for “aromatic water mix” when a Twitter user prompted it to make a recipe with water, bleach and ammonia. The recipe actually produced deadly chlorine gas.
This article is not all eye-popping A.I. errors and trendy YouTube formats. It also contains a nuanced discussion about the ways different cooks and recipe developers are using A.I. services.
I looked into a few Facebook pages that are posting what appear to be AI-generated recipes with AI-generated images. (How’d I come to suspect? The images had telltale signs of AI, like disappearing tines on a fork or weirdly shaped fingers or distorted edges.)
What I found most surprising: People are actually cooking these AI-generated recipes. Sometimes they’re even enjoying the results.
So I had to get in on the kitchen action myself. I made one of the salmon dishes — let’s call it “SalmonGPT.”
However real the food and recipes might incidentally be comes second to the mechanics of getting clicks, likes, and shares. Creators aren’t taking a moment to read or check any of this work, the way anyone would when testing out a recipe. The goal is simple: mass-generating content to populate sham blogs as fast as possible. These AI-generated food pages aren’t just silly experiments, they’re businesses — like the rest of food media. By generating high-click content and using algorithms to mimic the viral successes of real food blogs, the accounts accumulate display-ad revenue and further clutter search results with garbage. It’s a machine designed solely to grab attention and profit; food was never the point.
This article is my primary link for a reason: if you read nothing else in full from this collection, you should at least read this one.
I have so far been underwhelmed by the small amount of experimentation I have done with ChatGPT. I am an enthusiastic home cook and have tried to get it to help me make menus for a week’s worth of meals, and for individual dinner parties. It loves suggesting skewers, for some reason, and out-of-season produce even when I specify otherwise. I can see how it may be plausible for basic recipes being more reliably generated, as there are many types of cooking based around a set of similar techniques but with individual ingredient substitutions.
I keep stumbling across recipes in the wild clearly generated by robots. Thanks to Google’s power over the web, they follow the same format as any other recipe blog, complete with a rambling introduction and history of every ingredient in the dish. Remember: traffic does not originate solely from Facebook, and demonstrating topical “expertise” is essential for search optimization purposes. The images are incredibly shiny and impossible to miss on Pinterest. That is how I found three A.I. recipe websites within just a few minutes, two of which — That Oven Feelin’ and Easy Family Recipes — have nearly a million followers each on Facebook. The latter is part of a network of similar sites that, if their hosting information is anything to go by, are operated by the same people. All of these websites have a lot of ads.
If the way you find recipes is by searching the web or Pinterest, I would bet you have stumbled across a generated recipe at least once in the past couple of years.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduce the spread of false information. At the same time, Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement, potentially pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook Content Monetization program is currently invite-only, but Meta plans to make it widely available this year.
The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta, according to former professional Facebook hoaxsters and a former Meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety.
This is going to incentivize more slop of all kinds thanks in part to the business models of Google and Meta. Both companies have ways of rewarding people for being popular — Google Ads and Meta’s “Content Monetization” program. Even if you do not use Facebook, the open web you use is being flooded with slop like this. It offers no advantage over real recipe blogs — the exhausting narratives are still there — and it comes with a whiff of fraud.
Hyperspace searches for files with identical contents within one or more folders. If it finds any, it can then reclaim the disk space taken by all but one of the identical files — without removing any of the files!
You can learn more about how this is done, if you’re interested, but the short version is that Hyperspace uses a standard feature of the macOS file system: space-saving clones. The Finder does the same thing when you duplicate a file.
The screenshots on the Mac App Store listing might look like one of those “download more RAM” scams — “reclaim disk space… without removing files!” — but this is not fake. Stephen Hackett reclaimed “nearly a gigabyte”; John Voorhees, of MacStories, freed up 4.4 GB.
My situation is much less dramatic. Hyperspace requires MacOS 15, which means I cannot run it on my iMac containing a local copy of my music library, photos, and fifteen years of migrated data. On my MacBook Pro, used for far less strenuous tasks, the potential savings are around 57 MB. Luckily, Siracusa’s business model accounts for this — you can scan for free but you need to pay to de-duplicate data.
President Donald Trump’s Federal Trade Commission will “vigorously” sue to block illegal mergers, the agency’s new chairman said Monday, highlighting support for the repeated deal challenges during the Biden era.
“We are going to enforce these laws vigorously and aggressively,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in his first public appearance since becoming the agency’s leader last month. If the commission believes that a merger violates the law “you’re going to see us in court and if we think it doesn’t, we’re going to get out of the way.”
The FTC under the first Trump administration launched investigations into tech company acquisitions and sued Facebook. The former decision was made unanimously. The latter was a 3–2 vote, with the Republican chair joining the two Democratic commissioners in favour; the remaining two Republican commissioners voted against it. This suit was dismissed by a judge in 2021, shortly after Lina Khan took over the FTC. Under her watch, the FTC refiled, and will result in Meta facing trial this spring.
I am glad to see the FTC taking a more aggressive posture in antitrust. I hope it is more competent this time. Ferguson’s motivations are a mixed bag, but it makes sense to investigate the activities of some of the most powerful companies in the world.
Apple has committed to investing at least $1 billion with US-based companies as part of the [Advanced Manufacturing Fund], which is designed to foster innovative production and highly skilled jobs that will help lay the foundation for a new era of technology-driven manufacturing in the US.
This note was part of a press release announcing a large investment in Corning from this fund, and it began something of a tradition. While Apple has occasionally issued press announcements for similar investments at other times of the year, this one — from the early days of the first Trump administration — was the first in a two-part debut of what has become a tradition.
Apple in 2018 issued what is effectively the second part:
Combining new investments and Apple’s current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers — an estimated $55 billion for 2018 — Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years, not including Apple’s ongoing tax payments, the tax revenues generated from employees’ wages and the sale of Apple products.
Planned capital expenditures in the US, investments in American manufacturing over five years and a record tax payment upon repatriation of overseas profits will account for approximately $75 billion of Apple’s direct contribution.
This one was issued a few months after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect, containing tax repatriation policies for which Apple successfully lobbied.
Apple in April 2021, not long after the inauguration of Joe Biden:
Apple today announced an acceleration of its US investments, with plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion and add 20,000 new jobs across the country over the next five years. Over the past three years, Apple’s contributions in the US have significantly outpaced the company’s original five-year goal of $350 billion set in 2018. Apple is now raising its level of commitment by 20 percent over the next five years, supporting American innovation and driving economic benefits in every state. This includes tens of billions of dollars for next-generation silicon development and 5G innovation across nine US states.
Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.
These press releases are not for the wider public; they are not even directly for investors. They are for politicians and, in particular, whomever is the U.S. president. Apple issued nothing like these releases in 2019 or 2020, and not again from 2022–2024. It is plausible all of these announced investments would have happened regardless of who was president. The press releases are post-election reminders that Apple is a large business with the power to shape swathes of the U.S. and world economy, and they would prefer if their products avoid regulations and tariffs.
It would be useful if somebody were keeping tracking of all the company’s promises, though.
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I Do Not Understand Quantum Computers or the Apparent Breakthroughs From Google and Microsoft
Remember when new technology felt stagnant? All the stuff we use — laptops, smartphones, watches, headphones — coalesced around a similar design language. Everything became iterative or, in more euphemistic terms, mature. Attempts to find a new thing to excite people mostly failed. Remember how everything would change with 5G? How about NFTs? How is your metaverse house? The world’s most powerful hype machine could not make any of these things stick.
This is not necessarily a problem in the scope of the world. There should be a point at which any technology settles into a recognizable form and function. These products are, ideally, utilitarian — they enable us to do other stuff.
But here we are in 2025 with breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and, apparently, quantum computing and physics itself. The former is something I have written about at length already because it has become adopted so quickly and so comprehensively — whether we like it or not — that it is impossible to ignore. But the news in quantum computers is different because it is much, much harder for me to grasp. I feel like I should be fascinated, and I suppose I am, but mainly because I find it all so confusing.
This is not an explainer-type article. This is me working things out for myself. Join me. I will not get far.
Today I’m delighted to announce Willow, our latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.
The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.
Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 1025) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the Universe.
Microsoft today introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new Topological Core architecture that it expects will realize quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.
It leverages the world’s first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers.
Microsoft says it created a new state of matter and observed a particular kind of particle, both for the first time. In a twelve-minute video, the company defines this new era — called the “quantum age” — as a literal successor to the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. Jeez.
There is hype, and then there is hype. This is the latter. Even if it is backed by facts — I have no reason to suspect Microsoft is lying in large part because, to reiterate, I do not know anything about this — and even if Microsoft deserves this much attention, it is a lot. Maybe I have become jaded by one too many ostensibly world-changing product launches.
There is good reason to believe the excitement shown by Google and Microsoft is not pure hyperbole. The problem is neither company is effective at explaining why. As of writing the first sentence of this piece, my knowledge of quantum computers was only that they can be much, much, much faster than any computer today, thanks to the unique properties of quantum mechanics and, specifically, quantum bits. That is basically all. But what does a wildly fast computer enable in the real world? My brain can only grasp the consumer-level stuff I use, so I am reminded of something I wrote when the first Mac Studio was announced a few years ago: what utility does speed have?
I am clearly thinking in terms far too small. Domenico Vicinanza wrote a good piece for the Conversation earlier this year:
Imagine being able to explore every possible solution to a problem all at once, instead of once at a time. It would allow you to navigate your way through a maze by simultaneously trying all possible paths at the same time to find the right one. Quantum computers are therefore incredibly fast at finding optimal solutions, such as identifying the shortest path, the quickest way.
This explanation helped me — not a lot, but a little bit. What I remain confused by are the examples in the announcements from Google and Microsoft. Why quantum computing could help “discover new medicines” or “lead to self-healing materials” seems like it should be obvious to anyone reading, but I do not get it.
I am suspicious in part because technology companies routinely draw links between some new buzzy thing they are selling and globally significant effects: alleviating hunger, reducing waste, fixing our climate crisis, developing alternative energy sources, and — most of all — revolutionizing medical care. Search the web for (hyped technology) cancer and you can find this kind of breathless revolutionary language drawing a clear line between cancer care and 5G, 6G, blockchain, DAOs, the metaverse, NFTs, and Web3 as a whole. This likely speaks as much about insidious industries that take advantage of legitimate qualms with the medical system and fears of cancer, but it is nevertheless a pattern with these new technologies.
I am not even saying these promises are always wrong. Technological advancement has surely led to improving cancer care, among other kinds of medical treatments.
I have no big goal for this post — no grand theme or message. I am curious about the promises of quantum computers for the same reason I am curious about all kinds of inventions. I hope they work in the way Google, Microsoft, and other inventors in this space seem to believe. It would be great if some of the world’s neglected diseases can be cured and we could find ways to fix our climate.
But — and this is a true story — I read through Microsoft’s various announcement pieces and watched that video while I was waiting on OneDrive to work properly. I struggle to understand how the same company that makes a bad file syncing utility is also creating new states of matter. My brain is fully cooked.
Several years ago, I came across the word flong, and my life was changed. It led me to pose the question: Before photographic reproduction, how did newspaper comics syndicates in the era of metal relief printing send out cartoons to the hundreds or thousands of papers that printed a strip every day?
Finding the answer was a wonderful journey that led to my book How Comics Were Made. The book traces comics history from the 1890s to the present day and all the Rube Goldberg systems that allowed a cartoonist to draw a line and have it appear on newsprint—and now on a display. It’s a visual history of mostly forgotten printing history, the recovery of fascinating stories (such as why Garry Trudeau had to pull a week of Doonesbury strips in 1973 at the last minute), and an oral history by cartoonists who started their careers from the 1960s to the 2000s.
(And what is flong? A printing mold material made in sheet form from a wood pulp composite. Under great pressure, flong was pushed onto a raised metal plate. The result was sent to newspapers who poured hot lead in to make a reproduction of the original—a kind of metal photocopying.)
Apple is taking the unprecedented step of removing its highest level data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded access to user data.
[…]
The ADP service started to be pulled for new users at 1500GMT on Friday. Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.
A predictable next step but surely not the last. The U.K. wants access worldwide. Other governments will likely follow the same playbook knowing Apple will respond predictably.
I wonder where else in the world Advanced Data Protection is unavailable. I could not find any documentation about this from Apple. If it is anything like iCloud Private Relay, however, the list is short and not one a country nominally respectful of human rights would like to be on.
One of Apple’s preferred media outlets, 9to5Mac, received a statement and screenshot reflecting this change. Benjamin Mayo:
The law even seems to restrain Apple from publicly commenting on such implications; notice how the company’s statement above does not explicitly say why Apple is having to make these changes.
This is not something the law “seems” to do; it is plainly what the law requires. Still, it is a bizarre statement that only hints in the last sentence at what the U.K. government is demanding.
To reaffirm the changes, HP says in the staff memo: “The wait time for each customer is set to 15 minutes – notice the expected wait time is mentioned only in the beginning of the call.” The message will be read out three times during the wait time, after the initial reading.
The reason for the change? Getting people to figure it out themselves using online support. As HP put it: “Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve,” and “taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies.”
I had wondered whether Humane was looking forward to this kind of corporate culture. Then I remembered it gave people who spent a thousand dollars on a product not even one year old ten days’ notice all their data would be deleted and it would turn into a fridge magnet.
Now HP has abandoned the policy, and in a statement issued today, said:
“We’re always looking for ways to improve our customer service experience. This support offering was intended to provide more digital options with the goal of reducing time to resolve inquiries.
“We have found that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options we provide. Based on initial feedback, we know the importance of speaking to live customer service agents in a timely fashion is paramount. As a result, we will continue to prioritize timely access to live phone support to ensure we are delivering an exceptional customer experience.”
Oh, well, never mind then. It turns out your call really is important to them.
This is one of those things that will age me, but I truly miss the days when I could assume ready and capable post-purchase support. Good luck finding the phone number for HWCONA or NUBBYO.
Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra, of Wired, published a look at how third-party lists uploaded to Google DV360 allow targeting based on factors Google says its policies prohibit. It is more-or-less a story of Google’s failure to adequately moderate its platform, but it is vile to learn the kinds of segments these third-party advertisers are creating.
The article then moves into a discussion of the underlying technology of real-time bidding (RTB) that powers today’s ad markets, and this stood out to me:
“Even if Google were to change its practices and only initially broadcast RTB data to entities in the United States,” EPIC’s complaint says, the data would “inevitably” fall into foreign actors’ hands. “Google has no way to control what happens to the data that it broadcasts so freely,” it alleges. This was also the contention of the organization that develops technical standards for the advertising industry. Known as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the organization acknowledged in 2018 that there is “no technical way to limit the way data is used after the data is received by a vendor.”
Foreign actors and private surveillance firms have been caught routinely exploiting RTB systems by creating shell advertising companies in order to access bid-stream data: information on users broadcast between the demand and supply sides of an RTB auction. In 2022, Adalytics, a digital ad analysis firm, published a report alleging that Google was sharing RTB data with RuTarget, an ad-tech firm owned by Russia’s largest state bank; activity that Google says it ceased in response. In 2023, Bloomberg reported that, by operating its own demand-side platform, an Israeli surveillance company called Rayzone had gained direct access to Google’s RTB data.
I understand why this focuses on the implications of the digital advertising system for adversarial purposes. But an excerpt from Byron Tau’s book “Means of Control” was published — also in Wired — one year ago explaining how the United States also uses RTB signals for surveillance purposes — because of course it does. This is a steady flow of granular information all of us provide with basically no oversight. It is not something used only by distant and scary others.
Censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. Tech firms can employ confusing or unpredictable internal procedures that cut users off, sometimes with no ability appeal the decision. Such actions taken by tech platforms may harm consumers, affect competition, may have resulted from a lack of competition, or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct.
The FTC issued a Request for Information (RFI) requesting public comment on how consumers may have been harmed by technology platforms that limited their ability to share ideas or affiliations freely and openly.
This whole thing is written in neutral language, but almost certainly motivated by a longstanding belief that technology companies are biased against U.S. conservatives. This administration also wants to curtail the protections of Section 230 (PDF) of the Communications Decency Act; the questions in this RFI are directly tied to that goal.
There are legitimate complaints one can make about the power held by a handful of very large online platforms. But they are not infrastructure. Perhaps the best faith interpretation of the FTC’s concern is for people who make money off these platforms, and who have found themselves demonetized owing to their speech. Maybe that problem occurs on a larger scale than I can imagine, something the public comments will provide evidence for. But I doubt that. I bet it is a flood of people complaining some derogatory post of theirs received what they perceive to be an inadequate amount of engagement.
You can balance that out. I do not think it is productive to troll the FTC with fake comments. There is, however, evidence Meta has suppressed LGBTQ topics on Instagram and Threads. It would be worthwhile to document problems like these. At the very least, it shows there are lots of ways these platforms are inconsistent and buggy — and still powerful.
Clearview co-founder Hoan Ton-That stepped back as CEO in December and took on the role of president. Then, on Friday, following a Forbes inquiry, he told the company he was resigning, noting he was leaving to start the “next chapter of my life.” In a statement to Forbes, Ton-That said he would continue serving as a board member.
Jeans does not say why Forbes would have recently contacted Clearview or Ton-That personally. I am curious about the circumstances of his resignation.
Jeans:
Early investor and board member Hal Lambert took over as co-CEO in December, alongside cofounder Richard Schwartz, who is overseeing day-to-day operations, Lambert told Forbes in an interview. A former fundraiser for President Trump, Lambert said that he had stepped in to help Clearview “with the new administration,” adding, “There’s some opportunities there. I’m going to be helping with that effort.”
Near-universal facial recognition in the hands of this administration — what a frightening prospect. Keep an eye on that terriblesettlement.
However the company [Google] had previously come out strongly against this kind of data collection, saying in a 2019 blog that fingerprinting “subverts user choice and is wrong.”
But in a post announcing the new rule changes, Google said the way people used the internet – such as devices like smart TVs and consoles – meant it was harder to target ads to users using conventional data collection, which users control with cookie consent.
It also says more privacy options provide safety to users.
Something close to fingerprinting is what Google does with reCAPTCHA, though it still promises none of that information is used for targeted ads. If you improve your privacy protections online, you will see a lot more challenges from services like reCAPTCHA, including those from Cloudflare, and it makes using the web far more tedious.
Though Google previously prohibited fingerprinting for ads, plenty of ad tech businesses enabled the capability anyway. Even so, Google’s co-sign legitimizes this invasive and unethical practice. Google says there are better “privacy-enhancing technologies” but that feels like it comes with a caveat as ad tech businesses constantly innovate to evade them and track users regardless.
A law, please, with debilitating penalties for violations.
Let’s be clear about what’s happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He’s been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau” and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn’t a policy proposal to be analyzed; it’s the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump’s increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — [the New York Times’ Peter] Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party’s theoretical gains. It’s like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor’s new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.
This is the work of the chief White House correspondent in the U.S. prestige paper of record, and it reads like a parody. The focus of the story is, as Molloy writes, on the electoral calculus and partisan wisdom of stealing our country. It should actually be about the absurdity of the Washington chattering classes validating the lunacy of this president without considering the millions of real people living between Alaska and Maine.
HP Inc. announced a definitive agreement to acquire key AI capabilities from Humane, including their AI-powered platform Cosmos, highly skilled technical talent, and intellectual property with more than 300 patents and patent applications. The acquisition advances HP’s transformation into a more experience-led company.
In general, there is something a little saddening about the failure of a brand new company trying to do its own thing in a world of giants. There is a steep hill any smaller hardware business will face.
But it is also true that the A.I. Pin just seemed pretty bad. Only so much of that can be blamed on not having access to certain APIs or it being a first-generation product. It still cost $700 and required a subscription of $24 per month. And, while HP’s deal — for less than half what the company raised — includes the software, patents, and most of the staff, it excludes the A.I. Pin.
Device Timeline: Your Ai Pin will continue to function normally until 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. After this date, it will no longer connect to Humane’s servers, and .Center access will be fully retired.
Device Features: Your Ai Pin features will no longer include calling, messaging, Ai queries/responses, or cloud access.
That deadline is just ten days from the time of this announcement. These pins, which began shipping less than a year ago, cannot be refurbished or reused in any way, so they will all become fridge magnets — in just ten days. I get the instinct to blame people for buying this product, but I also understand well-heeled people trying something new. The amount of products that will now end up in landfills is a blight on those responsible for these decisions. They can kick rocks.
For more than 60 years, Canadian Tire money staked a legitimate claim as Canada’s unofficial second currency. At one point, a study showed half the country collected it. The coupons even made the Canadian Oxford dictionary.
[…]
Ultimately, experts speculate, Canadian Tire money fell victim to a world moving faster and smarter than ever. The coupon return on a purchase, once five per cent, depreciated to 0.4 per cent by the 2010s. Cash, at Canadian Tire and everywhere else, fell out of favour. And a digital rewards program gave the company an asset even more valuable than loyalty: data, on what and when and how often you buy.
This story yanked me right back to my childhood, finding Canadian Tire money jammed in the glove box and centre console of the family car. It was a loyalty program, sure, but one that had a unique charm and tactility that one does not get from a plastic card or by tapping their phone.
Thomas Germain, for BBC News, looked at the efforts of Ethan Zuckerman and others to study YouTube. Their findings are sometimes expected — most videos have been viewed fewer than 500 times — but often notable. Most videos are not edited, have no monetization, and have no requests for viewers to like, comment, and subscribe.
So, what is YouTube, anyway? A place for people like you and I to watch a relatively small number of headliners? Germain:
This narrative misses a critical piece of the picture, says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in Zuckerman’s lab, who participated in the scraping project. YouTube is a free service that was built from the ground up by a private company, and it could be argued that Google should be able to run the platform as such. But when you examine how people are actually using YouTube, it looks less like TV and more like infrastructure, McGrady says.
[…]
YouTube is one of the internet’s de facto repositories, the first place many of us go when we have videos we want to post or store online. It’s also a place where local authority meetings are broadcast, for example, providing a vital opportunity for public accountability in ways that weren’t possible before it existed. It isn’t just a “platform”, McGrady says, it’s a critical piece of infrastructure, and that’s how it should be regulated. “For companies that own so much of our public sphere, there are some minimum expectations we should have about transparency.”
I think it is generally a mistake to treat the popularity of corporations like these as a basis to treat them as infrastructure. They are at the very top of a deep stack. Fulfilling the law, the answer to this question should be “no, YouTube is not infrastructure”.
Even so, there is something appealing about this argument because video is special. It is cumbersome; it requires complex arrangements to serve it efficiently and reliably. But some of those barriers are becoming less foreboding, giving us more places to post and watch videos. It was not so long ago that YouTube was the only name in general-purpose video hosting. Yet you can now publish to most any social network. Instagram and TikTok host a different type of video but, for lots of people, they are just as relevant as YouTube. Alternatives like Rumble and X are appearing for the perpetually aggrieved set who are convinced their broadcasts would be censored elsewhere. Yet there is nothing else quite like YouTube.
I still believe it would be difficult and unwise to govern YouTube like it is infrastructure, even if it seems to have that role. And, so, the best thing we can do is to stop treating YouTube like infrastructure. It should not be the place to stream or archive government or board meetings. It should not be treated as a video host by other businesses. It is not a good destination for your important family video. It is a place to put those things to share them, if you would like, but it is not an archival choice. YouTube needs to have the ability to moderate videos because there are things expected of infrastructure but not appropriate for a general-purpose entertainment platform. As such, we need to stop seeing it as a video repository.
Update: As if to prove YouTube is still unique, Facebook says it is going to begin deleting old live broadcasts. For comparison, YouTube archives live videos indefinitely. It would be so great if there were alternatives not focused on boosting mindless reactionaries.
Priced originally at $65, it’s currently on sale for $39 (plus shipping) — no coupon is required.
How Comics Were Made follows the intensive, magical, and industrial journey a newspaper comic takes from a cartoonist’s hand through the transformative production process to make it ready to appear as ink on newsprint—and behind, onto digital displays. The book richly illustrates the stages through never-before-seen printing artifacts dating back as far as the 1890s, original artwork from cartoonists like Bill Watterson, Lynn Johnston, Garry Trudeau, and Charles Schulz.
Author Glenn Fleishman uses historic images, preserved items, and industrial films to reconstruct nearly forgotten processes of the metal relief era of printing, as well as more modern periods, as newspaper and printing in general shifted into photographic reproduction using flat metal offset printing, and then, ultimately, digital processes from drawing tablets to laser-etched plates. The story is told through historic and modern interviews. Glenn interviewed over 40 cartoonists and others in the comics world, including rare talks with Trudeau and Watterson.
If you love comics and history or know someone who does, How Comics Were Made provides a unique lens from the dawn of newspaper cartoons to the present.
(The current deep discount stems from the book being printed and warehoused in Canada. With tariffs possible by March, the author is eager to have the book reach an audience before it becomes unaffordable to import.)
Last year, a media investigation revealed that a Florida-based data broker, Datastream Group, was selling highly sensitive location data that tracked United States military and intelligence personnel overseas. At the time, the origin of that data was unknown.
Now, a letter sent to US senator Ron Wyden’s office that was obtained by an international collective of media outlets — including WIRED and 404 Media — claims that the ultimate source of that data was Eskimi, a little-known Lithuanian ad-tech company. Eskimi, meanwhile, denies it had any involvement.
The letter was apparently sent by Datastream, which means it either has no idea where it got this extremely precise location information, or Eskimi is being dishonest. That is kind of the data broker industry in a nutshell: a vast sea of our personal information being traded indiscriminately by businesses worldwide — whose names we have never heard of — with basically no accountability or limitations.
Something very useful from the Atlas of Type: a huge list of type foundries. Only a handful of Canadian designers on this list, including the legendary Canada Type and Pangram Pangram, but I was particularly excited to learn about Tiro Typeworks. They have a vast library of type for scientific and scholarly works — if you are reading this on MacOS, you probably have STIX Two installed — and they have also produced typefaces with vast language support, including for syllabics. Given their contributions to type design and the OpenType format, I feel like I used the word “legendary” above much too soon.
Netflix spokesperson MoMo Zhou has told The Verge that this morning’s window where Netflix appeared as a “participating” service in Apple TV — including temporary support for the watchlist and “continue watching” features — was an error and has now been rolled back. That’s a shame. The jubilation in our comments on the original story was palpable.
Netflix sincerely apologizes for giving people what they want.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
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In November 2023, two researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and their supervisor published “Dazed and Confused”, a working paper about Google’s reCAPTCHAv2 system. They write mostly about how irritating and difficult it is to use, and also explore its privacy and labour costs — and it is that last section in which I had some doubts when I first noticed the paper being passed around in July.
I was content to leave it there, assuming this paper would be chalked up as one more curiosity on a heap of others on arXiv. It has not been subjected to peer review at any journal, as far as I can figure out, nor can I find another academic article referencing it. (I am not counting the dissertation by one of the paper’s authors summarizing its findings.) Yet parts of it are on their way to becoming zombie statistics. Mike Elgan, writing in his October Computerworld column, repeated the paper’s claim that “Google might have profited as much as $888 billion from cookies created by reCAPTCHA sessions”. Ted Litchfield of PC Gamer included another calculation alleging solving CAPTCHAs “consum[ed] 7.5 million kWhs of energy[,] which produced 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution”; the article is headlined reCAPTCHAs “[…] made us spend 819 million hours clicking on traffic lights to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google”. In a Boing Boing article earlier this month, Mark Frauenfelder wrote:
[…] Through analyzing over 3,600 users, the researchers found that solving image-based challenges takes 557% longer than checkbox challenges and concluded that reCAPTCHA has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of human time valued at $6.1 billion in wages while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.
I get why these figures are alluring. CAPTCHAs are heavily studied; a search of Google Scholar for “CAPTCHA” returns over 171,000 results. As you might expect, most are adversarial experiments, but there are several examining usability and, others, privacy. However, I could find just one previous paper correlating, say, emissions and CAPTCHA solving, and it was a joke paper (PDF) from the 2009 SIGBOVIK conference, “the Association for Computational Heresy Special Interest Group”. Choice excerpt: “CAPTCHAs were the very starting point for human computation, a recently proposed new field of Computer Science that lets computer scientists appear less dumb to the world”. Excellent.
So you can see why the claims of the U.C. Irvine researchers have resonated in the press. For example, here is what they — Andrew Searles, Renascence Tarafder Prapty, and Gene Tsudik — wrote in their paper (PDF) about emissions:
Assuming un-cached scenarios from our technical analysis (see Appendix B), network bandwidth overhead is 408 KB per session. This translates into 134 trillion KB or 134 Petabytes (194 x 1024 Terrabytes [sic]) of bandwidth. A recent (2017) survey estimated that the cost of energy for network data transmission was 0.06 kWh/GB (Kilowatt hours per Gigabyte). Based on this rate, we estimate that 7.5 million kWh of energy was used on just the network transmission of reCAPTCHA data. This does not include client or server related energy costs. Based on the rates provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Energy Information Administration (EIA), 1 kWh roughly equals 1-2.4 pounds of CO2 pollution. This implies that reCAPTCHA bandwidth consumption alone produced in the range of 7.5-18 million pounds of CO2 pollution over 9 years.
Obviously, any emissions are bad — but how much is 7.5–18 million pounds of CO2 over nine years in context? A 2024 working paper from the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency estimated residential properties each produce 6.8 metric tons of CO2 emissions from electricity and heating, or about 15,000 pounds. That means CAPTCHAs produced as much CO2 as providing utilities to 55–133 U.S. houses per year. Not good, sure, but not terrible — at least, not when you consider the 408 kilobyte session transfer against, say, Google’s homepage, which weighs nearly 2 MB uncached. Realistically, CAPTCHAs are not a meaningful burden on the web or our environment.
The numbers in this discussion area are suspect. From these CO2 figures to the value of reCAPTCHA cookies — apparently responsible for nearly half of Google’s revenue from when it acquired the company — I find the evidence for them lacking. Yet they continue to circulate in print and, now, in a Vox-esque mini documentary.
The video, on the CHUPPL “investigative journalism” YouTube channel, was created by Jack Joyce. I found it via Frauenfelder, of Boing Boing, and it was also posted by Daniel Sims at TechSpot and Emma Roth at the Verge. The roughly 17-minute mini-doc has been watched nearly 200,000 times, and the CHUPPL channel has over 350,000 subscribers. Neither number is massive for YouTube, but it is not a small amount of viewers, either. Four of the ten videos from CHUPPL have achieved over a million views apiece. This channel has a footprint. But watching the first half of its reCAPTCHA video is what got me to open BBEdit and start writing this thing. It is a masterclass in how the YouTube video essay format and glossy production can mask bad journalism. I asked CHUPPL several questions about this video and did not receive a response by the time I published this.
Let me begin at the beginning:
How does this checkbox know that I’m not a robot? I didn’t click any motorcycles or traffic lights. I didn’t even type in distorted words — and yet it knew. This infamous tech is called reCAPTCHA and, when it comes to reach, few tools rival its presence across the web. It’s on twelve and a half million websites, quietly sitting on pages that you visit every day, and it’s actually not very good at stopping bots.
While Joyce provides sources for most claims in this video, there is not one for this specific number. According to BuiltWith, which tracks technologies used on websites, the claim is pretty accurate — it sees it used on about twelve million websites, and it is the most popular CAPTCHA script.
But Google has far more popular products than these if it wants to track you across the web. Google Maps, for example, is on over 15 million live websites, Analytics is on around 31 million, and AdSense is on nearly 49 million. I am not saying that we should not be concerned about reCAPTCHA because it is on only twelve million sites, but that number needs context. Google Maps is more popular, according to BuiltWith, than reCAPTCHA. If Google wants to track user activity across the web, AdSense is explicitly designed for that purpose. Yes, it is probably true that “few tools rival its presence across the web”, but you can say that of just about any technology from Google, Meta, Amazon, Cloudflare, and a handful of other giants — but, especially, Google.
Back to the intro:
It turns out reCAPTCHA isn’t what we think it is, and the public narrative around reCAPTCHA is an impossibly small sliver of the truth. And by accepting that sliver as the full truth, we’ve all been misled. For months, we followed the data, we examined glossed over research, and uncovered evidence that most people don’t know exists. This isn’t the story of an inconsequential box. It’s the story of a seemingly innocent tool and how it became a gateway for corporate greed and mass surveillance. We found buried lawsuits, whispers of the NSA, and echoes of Edward Snowden. This is the story of the future of the Internet and who’s trying to control it.
The claims in this introduction vastly oversell what will be shown in this video. The lawsuits are not “buried”, they were linked from the reCAPTCHA Wikipedia article as it appeared before the video was published. The “whispers” and “echoes” of mass surveillance disclosures will prove to be based on almost nothing. There are real concerns with reCAPTCHA, and this video does justice to almost none of them.
The main privacy problems with reCAPTCHA are found in its ubiquity and its ownership. Google swears up and down it collects device and user behaviour data through reCAPTCHA only for better bot detection. It issued a statement saying as much to Techradar in response to the “Dazed and Confused” paper circulating again. In a 2021 blog post announcing reCAPTCHA Enterprise — the latest version combining V2, V3, and the mobile SDKs under a single brand — Google says:
Today, reCAPTCHA Enterprise is a pure security product. Information collected is used to provide and improve reCAPTCHA Enterprise and for general security purposes. We don’t use this data for any other purpose.
[…] Additionally, none of the data collected can be used for personalized advertising by Google.
Google goes on to explain that it collects data as a user navigates through a website to help determine if they are a bot without having to present a challenge. Again, it is adamant none of this data is used to feed its targeted advertising machine.
There are a couple of problems with this. First, because Google does not disclose exactly how reCAPTCHA works, its promise requires that you trust the company. It is not a great idea to believe the word of corporations in general. Specifically, in Google’s case, a leak of its search ranking signals last year directlycontradicted its public statements. But, even though Google was dishonest then, there is currently no evidence reCAPTCHA data is being misused in the way Joyce’s video suggests. Coyly asking questions with sinister-sounding music underneath is not a substitute for evidence.
The second problem is the way Google’s privacy policy can be interpreted, as reported by Thomas Claburn in 2020 in the Register:
Zach Edwards, co-founder of web analytics biz Victory Medium, found that Google’s reCAPTCHA’s JavaScript code makes it possible for the mega-corp to conduct “triangle syncing,” a way for two distinct web domains to associate the cookies they set for a given individual. In such an event, if a person visits a website implementing tracking scripts tied to either those two advertising domains, both companies would receive network requests linked to the visitor and either could display an ad targeting that particular individual.
You will hear from Edwards later in Joyce’s video making a similar argument. Just because Google can do this, it does not mean it is actually doing so. It has the far more popular AdSense for that.
ReCAPTCHA interacts with three Google cookies when it is present: AEC, NID, and OGPC. According to Google, AEC is “used to detect spam, fraud, and abuse” including for advertising click fraud. I could not find official documentation about OGPC, but it and NID appear to be used for advertising for signed-out users. Of these, NID is most interesting to me because it is also used to store Google Search preferences, so someone who uses Google’s most popular service is going to have it set regardless, and its value is fixed for six months. Therefore, it is possible to treat it as a unique identifier for that time.
I could not find a legal demand of Google specifically for reCAPTCHA history. But I did find a high-profile request to re-identify NID cookies. In 2017, the first Trump administration began seizing records from reporters, including those from the New York Times. The Times uses Google Apps for its email system. That administration and then the Biden one tried obtaining email metadata, too, while preventing Times executives from disclosing anything about it. In the warrant (PDF), the Department of Justice demands of Google:
PROVIDER is required to disclose to the United States the following records and other information, if available, for the Account(s) for the time period from January 14, 2017, through April 30, 2017, constituting all records and other information relating to the Account(s) (except the contents of communications), including:
[…]
Identification of any PROVIDER account(s) that are linked to the Account(s) by cookies, including all PROVIDER user IDs that logged into PROVIDER’s services by the same machine as the Account(s).
And by “cookies”, the government says that includes “[…] cookies related to user preferences (such as NID), […] cookies used for advertising (such as NID, SID, IDE, DSID, FLC, AID, TAID, and exchange_uid) […]” plus Google Analytics cookies. This is not the first time Google’s cookies have been used in intelligence or law enforcement matters — the NSA has, of course, been using them that way for years — but it is notable for being an explicit instance of tying the NID cookie, which is among those used with reCAPTCHA, to a user’s identity. (Google says site owners can use a different reCAPTCHA domain to disassociate its cookies.) Also, given the effort of the Times’ lawyers to release this warrant, it is not surprising I was unable to find another public document containing similar language. I could not find any other reporting on this cookie-based identification effort, so I think this is news. In this case, Google successfully fought the government’s request for email metadata.
Assuming Google retains these records, what the Department of Justice was demanding would be enough to connect a reCAPTCHA user to other Google product activity and a Google account holder using the shared NID cookie. Furthermore, it is a problem that so much of the web relies on a relative handful of companies. Google has long treated the open web as its de facto operating system, coercing site owners to use features like AMP or making updates to comply with new search ranking guidelines. It is not just Google that is overly controlling, to be fair — I regularly cannot access websites on my iMac because Cloudflare believes I am a robot and it will not let me prove otherwise — but it is the most significant example. Its fingers in every pie — from site analytics, to fonts, to advertising, to maps, to browsers, to reCAPTCHA — means it has a unique vantage point from which to see how billions of people use the web.
These are actual privacy concerns, but you will learn none of them from Joyce’s video. You will instead be on the receiving end of a scatterbrained series of suggestions of reCAPTCHA’s singularly nefarious quality, driven by just-asking-questions conspiratorial thinking, without reaching a satisfying destination.
From here on, I am going to use timecodes as reference points. 1:56:
Journalists told you such a small sliver of the truth that I would consider it to be deceptive.
Bad news: Joyce is about to be fairly deceptive while relying on the hard work of journalists.
At 3:24:
Okay, you’re probably thinking “why does any of this matter?”, and I agree with you.
I did agree with you. I actually halted this investigation for a few weeks because I thought it was quite boring — until I went to renew my passport. (Passport status dot state dot gov.)
I got a CAPTCHA — not a checkbox, not fire hydrants, but the old one. And I clicked it. And it took me here.
The “here” Joyce mentions is a page at captcha.org, which is redirected from its original destination at captcha.com. The material is similar on both. The ownership of the .org domain is unclear, but the .com is run by Captcha, Inc., and it sells the CAPTCHA package used by the U.S. Department of State among other government departments. I have a sneaking suspicion the .org retains some ties to Captcha, Inc. given the DNS recordsof each. Also, the list of CAPTCHA software on the .org site begins with all the packages offered by Captcha, Inc., and its listing for reCAPTCHA is outdated — it does not display Google as its owner, for example — but the directory’s operators found time to add the recaptcha.sucks website.
About that. 4:07:
An entire page dedicated to documenting the horrors of reCAPTCHA: alleging national security implications for the U.S. and foreign governments, its ability to doxx users, mentioning secret FISA orders — the same type of orders that Edward Snowden risked his life to warn us about. […]
Who put this together? “Anonymous”.
if you are a web-native journalist, wishing to get in touch, we doubt you are going to have a hard-time figuring out who we are anyway.
This felt like a key left in plain sight, whispering there’s a door nearby and it’s meant to be opened. This is what we’re good at. This is what we do.
The U.S. “national security implications” are, as you can see on screen as these words are being said, not present: “stay tuned — it will be continued”, the message from ten years ago reads. The FISA reference, meanwhile, is a quote from Google’s national security requests page acknowledging the types of data it can disclose under these demands. It is a note that FISA exists and, under that law, Google can be compelled to disclose user data — a policy that applies to every company.
This all comes from the ReCAPTCHA Sucks website. On the About page, the site author acknowledges they are a competitor and maintains their anonymity is due to trademark concerns:
a free-speech / gripe-site on trademarked domains must not be used in a ‘bad faith’ — what includes promotion of competing products and services.
and under certain legal interpretations disclosing of our identity here might be construed as a promotion of our own competing captcha product or service.
it frustrates us indeed, but those are the rules of the game.
The page concludes, as Joyce quoted:
if you are a web-native journalist, wishing to get in touch, we doubt you are going to have a hard-time figuring out who we are anyway.
Joyce reads this as a kind of spooky challenge yet, so far as I can figure out, did not attempt to contact the site’s operators. I asked CHUPPL about this and I have not heard back. It is not very difficult to figure out who they are. The site has a shared technical infrastructure, including a historic Google Analytics account, with captcha.com. It feels less like the work of a super careful anonymous tipster, and more like an open secret from an understandably cheesed competitor.
5:05:
Okay, let’s get this out of the way: reCAPTCHA is not and really has never been very good at stopping bots.
Joyce points to the success rate of a couple of reCAPTCHA breakers here as evidence of its ineffectiveness, though does not mention they were both against the audio version. What Joyce does not establish is whether these programs were used much in the real world.
In 2023, Trend Micro published research into the way popular CAPTCHA solving services operate. Despite the seemingly high success rate of automated techniques, “they break CAPTCHAs by farming out CAPTCHA-breaking tasks to actual human solvers” because there are a lot more services out there than reCAPTCHA. That is exactly how many CAPTCHA solvers markettheirservices, though some are now saying they use A.I. instead. Also, it is not as though other types of CAPTCHAs are not subject to similar threats. In 2021, researchers solved hCAPTCHA (PDF) with a nearly 96% success rate. Being only okay at stopping bot traffic is not unique to reCAPTCHA, and these tools are just one of several technologies used to minimize automated traffic. And, true enough, none of these techniques is perfect, or even particularly successful. But that does not mean their purpose is nefarious, as Joyce suggests later in the video, at 11:45:
Google has said that they don’t use the data collected from reCAPTCHA for targeted advertising, which actually scares me a bit more. If not for targeted ads, which is their whole business model, why is Google acting like an intelligence agency?
Joyce does not answer this directly, instead choosing to speculate about a way reCAPTCHA data could be used to identify people who submit anonymous tips to the FBI — yes, really. More on that later.
5:49:
2018 was the launch of V3. According to researchers at U.C. Irvine, there’s practically no difference between V2 and V3.
Onscreen, Joyce shows an excerpt from the “Dazed and Confused” paper, and the sentence fragment “there is no discernable difference between reCAPTCHAv2 and reCAPTCHAv3” is highlighted. But just after that, you can see the sentence continues: “in terms of appearance or perception of image challenges and audio challenges”.
Screenshot from CHUPPL video.
Remember: these researchers were mainly studying the usability of these CAPTCHAs. This section is describing how users perceive the similar challenges presented by both versions. They are not saying V2 and V3 have “practically no difference” in general terms.
At 6:56:
ReCAPTCHA “takes a pixel-by-pixel fingerprint” of your browser. A real-time map of everything you do on the internet.
This part contains a quote from a 2015 Business Insider article by Lara O’Reilly. O’Reilly, in turn, cites research by AdTruth, then — as now — owned by Experian. I can find plenty of references to O’Reilly’s article but, try as I might, I have not been able to find a copy of the original report. But, as a 2017 report from Cracked Labs (PDF) points out, Experian’s AdTruth “provides ‘universal device recognition’”, “creat[ing] a ‘unique user ID’ for each device, by collecting information such as IP addresses, device models and device settings”. To the extent “pixel-by-pixel fingerprint” means anything in this context — it does not, but it misleadingly sounds to me like it is taking screenshots — Experian’s offering also fits that description. It is a problem there are so many things which quietly monitor user activity across their entire digital footprint.
Unfortunately, at 7:41, Joyce whiffs hard while trying to make this point:
If there’s any part of this video you should listen to, it’s this. Stop making dinner, stop scrolling on your phone, and please listen.
When I tell you that reCAPTCHA is watching you, I’m not saying that in some abstract, metaphorical way. Right now, reCAPTCHA is watching you. It knows that you’re watching me. And it doesn’t want you to know.
This stumbles in two discrete ways. First, reCAPTCHA is owned by Google, but so is YouTube. Google, by definition, knows what you are doing on YouTube. It does not need reCAPTCHA to secretly gather that information, too.
Second, the evidence Joyce presents for why “it doesn’t want you to know” is that Google has added some CSS to hide a floating badge, a capability it documents. This is for one presentation of reCAPTCHAv2, which is as invisible background validation and where a checkbox is shown only to suspicious users.
Screenshot from CHUPPL video.
I do not think Google “does not want you to know” about reCAPTCHA on YouTube. I think it thinks it is distracting. Google products using other Google technologies has not been a unique concern since the company merged user data and privacy policies in 2012.
The second half of the video, following the sponsor read, is a jumbled mess of arguments. Joyce spends time on a 2015 class action lawsuit filed against Google in Massachusetts alleging completing the old-style word-based reCAPTCHA was unfairly using unpaid labour to transcribe books. It was tossed in 2016because the plaintiff (PDF) “failed to identify any statute assigning value to the few seconds it takes to transcribe one word”, and “Google’s profit is not Plaintiff’s damage”.
Joyce then takes us on a meandering journey through the way Google’s terms of use document is written — this is where we hear from Edwards reciting the same arguments as appeared in that 2020 Register article — and he touches briefly on the U.S. v. Google antitrust trial, none of which concerned reCAPTCHA. There is a mention of a U.K. audit in 2015 specifically related to its 2012 privacy policy merger. This is dropped with no explanation into the middle of Edwards’ questioning of what Google deems “security related” in the context of its current privacy policy.
Then we get to the FBI stuff. Remember earlier when I told you Joyce has a theory about how Google uses reCAPTCHA to unmask FBI tipsters? Here is when that comes up again:
Check this out: if you want to submit a tip to the FBI, you’re met with this notice acknowledging your right to anonymity. But even though the State Department doesn’t use reCAPTCHA, the FBI and the NSA do. […] If they want to know who submitted the anonymous report, Google has to tell them.
This is quite the theory. There is video of Edward Snowden and clips from news reports about the mysteries of the FISA court. Dramatic music. A chart of U.S. government requests for user data from Google.
But why focus on reCAPTCHA when the FBI and NSA — and a whole bunch of other government sites — also use Google Analytics? Though Google says Analytics cookies are distinct from those used by its advertising services, site owners can link them together, which would not be obvious to users. There is no evidence the FBI or any other government agency is doing so. The actual problem here is that sensitive and ostensibly anonymous government sites are using any Google services whatsoever, probably because they are a massive corporation with lots of widely-used products and services.
Even so, many federal sites use the product offered by Captcha, Inc. and it seems to respect privacy by being self-hosted. All of them should just use that. The U.S. government has its own analytics service; the stats are public. The reason for inconsistencies is probably the same reason any massive organization’s websites are fragmented: it is a lot of work to keep them unified.
Joyce juxtaposes this with the U.S. Secret Service’s use of Babel Street’s Locate X data. He does not explain any direct connection to reCAPTCHA or Google, and there is a very good reason for this: there is none. Babel Street obtained some of its location data from Venntel, which is owned by Gravy Analytics, which obtained it from personalized ads.
Joyce ultimately settles on a good point near the end of the video, saying Google uses various browsing signals “before, during, and after” clicking the CAPTCHA to determine whether you are likely human. If it does not have enough information about you — “you clear your cookies, you are browsing Incognito, maybe you are using a privacy-focused browser” — it is more likely to challenge you.
None of this is actually news. It has all been disclosed by Google itself on its website and in a 2014 Wired article by Andy Greenberg, linked from O’Reilly’s Business Insider story. This is what Joyce refers to at 7:24 in the video in saying “reCAPTCHA doesn’t need to be good at stopping bots because it knows who you are. The new reCAPTCHA runs in the background, is invisible, and only shows challenges to bots or suspicious users”. But that is exactly how reCAPTCHA stops bots, albeit not perfectly: it either knows who you are and lets you through without a challenge, or it asks you for confirmation.
It is this very frustration I have as I try to protect my privacy while still using the web. I hit reCAPTCHA challenges frequently, especially when working on something like this article, in which I often relied on Google’s superior historical index and advanced search operators to look up stories from ten years ago. As I wrote earlier, I run into Cloudflare’s bot wall constantly on one of my Macs but not the other, and I often cannot bypass it without restarting my Mac or, ironically enough, using a private browsing window. Because I use Safari, website data is deleted more frequently, which means I am constantly logging into services I use all the time. The web becomes more cumbersome to use when you want to be tracked less.
There are three things I want to leave you with. First, there is an interesting video to be made about the privacy concerns of reCAPTCHA, but this is not it. It is missing evidence, does not put findings in adequate context, and drifts conspiratorially from one argument to another while only gesturing at conclusions. Joyce is incorrect in saying “journalists told you such a small sliver of the truth that I would consider it to be deceptive”. In fact, they have done the hard work over many years to document Google’s many privacy failures — including in reCAPTCHA. That work should bolster understandable suspicions about massive corporations ruining our right to privacy. This video is technically well produced, but it is of shoddy substance. It does not do justice to the work of the better journalists whose work it relies upon.
Second, CAPTCHAs offer questionable utility. As iffy as I find the data in the discussion section of the “Dazed and Confused” paper, its other findings seem solid: people find it irritating to label images or select boxes containing an object. A different paper (PDF) with two of the same co-authors and four other researchers found people most like reCAPTCHA’s checkbox-only presentation — the one that necessarily compromises user privacy — but also found some people will abandon tasks rather than solve a CAPTCHA. Researchers in 2020 (PDF) found CAPTCHAs were an impediment to people with visual disabilities. This is bad. Unfortunately, we are in a new era of mass web scraping — one reason I was able to so easily find many CAPTCHA solving services. Site owners wishing to control that kind of traffic have options like identifying user agents or I.P. address strings, but all of these can be defeated. CAPTCHAs can, too. Sometimes, all you can do is pile together a bunch of bad options and hope the result is passable.
Third, this is yet another illustration of how important it is for there to be strong privacy legislation. Nobody should have to question whether checking a box to prove they are not a robot is, even in a small way, feeding a massive data mining operation. We are never going to make progress on tracking as long as it remains legal and lucrative.
Germany’s antitrust watchdog has been investigating Apple’s app privacy framework since 2022. On Thursday, releasing preliminary findings from this probe, the Bundeskartellamt (FCO) said it suspects the iPhone maker may not be treating third-party app developers as equally as the law requires.
The antitrust watchdog said it believes Apple’s behavior could amount to self-preferencing. Apple is banned from preferring its own services and products in Germany since April 2023, when it became subject to special abuse controls aimed at regulating big tech’s market power.
The Bundeskartellamt says a ruling to Apple’s appeal over the April 2023 decision is expected in March. So far, its findings over App Tracking Transparency remain “preliminary”; it says “Apple now has the opportunity to comment on the allegations”.
Zac Hall, of 9to5Mac, received a statement from Apple reading, in part:
Apple has led the way in developing industry leading technologies to provide users great features without compromising privacy. App Tracking Transparency gives users more control of their privacy through a required, clear, and easy-to-understand prompt about one thing: tracking. That prompt is consistent for all developers, including Apple, and we have received strong support for this feature from consumers, privacy advocates, and data protection authorities around the world.
This does not meaningfully address the German authority’s concerns, which are based on the way Apple defines “tracking” as exclusively a third-party phenomenon. Apple collects highly granular data about users’ interactions with its internet services and associates it with their Apple ID. It allows precise ad targeting. I would expect people to have more comfort around first-party collection than third-party, but Apple’s own definition of “tracking” excludes these behaviours.
Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year. The company had stopped advertising on the social media platform in November 2023 following controversial remarks made by its owner Elon Musk.
Translation: Apple is participating in a nakedly corrupt government by giving money to co-president Elon Musk, an increasing level of cooperation which will continue to be justified on the basis it is a disproportionately influential public corporation with shares held by retirement funds and, therefore, should continue blurring the lines between diplomacy and obsequiousness.
Apple doesn’t have to end up with the best large language model around to win the AI wars. It can be in the ballpark of the best or partner with the leaders to get what it needs. But it can’t fail at the part that is uniquely Apple: Making those features a pleasure to use, in the way we all expect from Apple. Right now, that’s where Apple is failing.
I get why Apple wanted to rush these things out. I disagree with it since it betrays a lack of confidence in the time it takes to thoughtful and polished software — but I get it. Yet we can only judge the products that have shipped, and what we can use right now is disappointing because it feels sloppy.
As Snell writes, Apple has a chance to move A.I. features beyond a blinking cursor in a chat bot — like a plain language command line. Very little of what is out today is a thoughtful implementation of these features. Cleanup in Photos is pretty good. Most of the other stuff — summaries of phone calls, Notification Summaries, Writing Tools, Memory Movies in Photos, and response suggestions in Mail and Messages — are more cumbersome than they are elegant.
Shopify’s general counsel said the company took down musician Kanye West’s online store because of the potential for fraud, not because it was selling a Nazi T-shirt, an internal staff announcement obtained by The Logic reveals.
In the message, which was posted on Shopify’s Slack Tuesday morning, general counsel Jess Hertz said the swastika-emblazoned T-shirt listed for sale by West was “a stunt” and “not a good faith attempt to make money.” This, Hertz added, “brought with it the real risk of fraud.” It was for this reason, she added, that the store had been closed.
Here is the thing: choosing not to support Nazis, even tacitly, is a pretty comfortable stance to take. You are in good company if you just say no to Nazi stuff. Nobody gets points for providing infrastructure to sell Nazi merch. What Shopify’s general counsel is indicating is that it would be happy to operate this store so long as orders for these shirts would actually be fulfilled.
Apple Inc. is renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on its Maps app, following an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on his first day in office.
[…]
Apple is making the change Tuesday for customers in the US, but said it would soon roll out the shift for all users globally. Apple offers its Maps app on most of its devices, including the iPhone, iPad and Mac, and recently launched a web version to better compete with Google Maps.
In the United States, Google Maps labels it “Gulf of America”; in nearly every other region, it is shown as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”. However, in Mexico, it is displayed as “Gulf of Mexico” only. So far, Bing and MapQuest have not updated their maps, as Gurman writes. Neither has Mapbox. OpenStreetMap is currently displaying “Gulf of Mexico” everywhere but in the U.S., but that has been a contentious choice.
All of these digital map distributors have choices. The best choice, given the circumstances, is to display “Gulf of America” only in the U.S. and, I suppose, in any other country pledging loyalty to this jingoistic change. Google’s decision seems like an acceptable alternative, and it is what I hope Gurman means in reporting the change will be seen by “all users globally”. (Update: I like Steve Jamieson’s suggestion to “localize it [in the U.S.] as ‘Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)'”. Then, everywhere else, reversing the order or dropping the “Gulf of America” part makes sense. But I fear a compromise is not what this president has in mind, and it will put any company that attempts this at risk of being singled out.)
I do not think it makes sense to be mad at mapmakers updating their labels to correctly reflect official naming changes, nor do I think it is helpful to file bug reports against the name. I do think people should continue mocking the stupidity of this renaming as it is a minor symptom of a nationalistic verve.
By the way, the big mountain in Alaska is still showing as “Denali”, even in U.S. Google Maps. The National Parks Service has fully removed its page on the history of the mountain’s name; it simply redirects to a page that makes no mention of it. Is it good when a country is desperately burying its history? Asking for a neighbour.
Yesterday, the Associated Press found itself locked out of an Oval Office press event for refusing to bow to presidential pressure to change its style guide. The reason? The AP won’t refer to the Gulf of Mexico exclusively as the “Gulf of America,” as newly-renamed by executive order.
This may seem like a relatively minor dispute on the surface. After all, what’s in a name? But that’s exactly what makes this such a perfect example of how authoritarianism creeps into our lives — it starts with something that might feel insignificant before snowballing into something much worse.
In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgement.
I am still unsure copyright law or, for that matter, robots.txt are the best tools for creators to control A.I. training, but this ruling sure seems to complicate the fair use justification upon which the entire field is currently based.
Last week, the Washington Post broke the news that the U.K. government is demanding access to iCloud accounts with Advanced Data Protection enabled. Joseph Menn, the Post:
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. […]
This phrasing is, it turns out, somewhat ambiguous, as Myke Hurley points out in the latest episode of “Upgrade”, starting at about 39:15; this transcript is adapted from David Smith’s:
The BBC is the only outlet that, from what I can see, has done their own reporting on this. I’ve been reading a bunch of them, and everybody’s reporting the same thing. The BBC’s reporting is different. They are saying that the U.K. wants to have access to the data in Advanced Data Protection if it was needed in the same way that a law enforcement agency can request iCloud data from anyone where needed.
Zoe Kleinman, in the BBC News article Hurley references:
It’s also important to note that the government notice does not mean the authorities are suddenly going to start combing through everybody’s data.
It is believed that the government would want to access this data if there were a risk to national security – in other words, it would be targeting an individual, rather than using it for mass surveillance.
Authorities would still have to follow a legal process, have a good reason and request permission for a specific account in order to access data – just as they do now with unencrypted data.
A small point of correction to Hurley: the Financial Times story also relies on its own reporting. The Times plays it down the middle and without reference to either mass surveillance nor targeted unlocking.
Reading all three stories is actually a good exercise in interpreting what each outlet’s sources disclosed and was deemed important. Yet the varying interpretations strike me as a distinction without much difference. Hurley is likely correct in understanding the BBC story as more accurate, but to comply with those demands is to create the “blanket capability” necessarily. What I believe to be the case — reading between the lines and without a copy of the technical capability notice — is that the U.K. government is asking Apple to create a back door in the Advanced Data Protection process and then, if it has a warrant for one of those accounts, it can ask Apple to decrypt this data. This is both technically a “blanket capability” and still, in policy, individually targeted.
Regardless of specifics, this demand — as noted by both Hurley and co-host Jason Snell — is still very bad. It applies to global data demands, meaning Apple cannot simply turn off Advanced Data Protection for U.K. users, and there is a narrow path by which Apple may dispute it.
The UK government’s approach here is particularly insidious. While Apple can appeal the order, their appeal rights are bizarrely limited: They can only argue about the cost of implementing the backdoor, not the catastrophic privacy and security implications for billions of users worldwide. This reveals the UK government’s complete indifference to the fundamental right to privacy.
The best case scenario is for the U.K. government to drop this demand. But these demands for encrypted data will keep coming. I expect the businesses I entrust with my data — like Apple and Backblaze — to stand by their end-to-end encryption promises. In this case, however, I am not sure what that looks like. It is hard to imagine arguing anything is too costly for one of the richest companies in the world.
Even though a 2023 class action suit filed by authors against Meta has been shaky so far, some of the details in what is left of the suit are stunning. Apparently, Meta downloaded a hundred terabytes of pirated books, according to documents recently unsealed.
Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.
Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again, because allegedly the new facts “contradict prior deposition testimony.”
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the “decision to use LibGen occurred” after “a prior escalation to MZ,” authors alleged.
It should surprise nobody that A.I. is trained on illicit material. Even if you believe A.I. training through bulk web scraping is a perfectly legitimate expression of free use, it is obviously going to run across things which are posted illegally. There are entire blockbuster movies on video platforms; photos and books get reshared without permission constantly.
If Meta or any other A.I. company had bothered to license this data from its copyright holders, it would be less likely to ingest pirated material. That would, of course, be expensive and slow. But Meta, as of writing, posted the world’s seventh highest earnings in its 2024 fiscal year: over $71 billion. I think it can afford to pay for the data it harvests.
The federal government has reversed its advertising boycott of Meta spending nearly $300,000 for campaigns on the company’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms.
The reversal comes despite Meta’s continued ban on posting news from Canadian media sites.
This was retaliation for Meta’s restriction on news links in Canada which was, itself, a response to link tax legislation. But what a time to resume spending on a platform publicly and loudly aligning itself with a government that really does want to take over our country. It sure sucks that one of the most effective ways for the Canadian government to advertise to Canadians is necessarily through the U.S. duopoly.
To use Kagi as your default search engine in Safari, you have to install Kagi’s Safari extension.
So I installed the extension and entered a search in the Safari address bar. Note below how Safari says “Search Google” and “Google Search”, even though I’m supposed to be using Kagi.
[…]
Why does this happen? It turns out that Safari has no extension API to set a new search engine. The workaround for the lack of an API is a kind of hack: Safari extensions instead use the webNavigation onBeforeNavigate API to detect a connection to your default search engine, and then they redirect to your custom search engine using the tabs update() API. This technique is not unique to the Kagi extension. Other Safari extensions such as xSearch must do the same thing, because there’s no better way.
Even though Chrome is made by Google, it lets you pick another search engine. Even though Edge is made by Microsoft, it doesn’t lock you into Bing, and you can add any search URL template that you want. Apple is not encumbered with its own search engine to push, yet it seems to be constrained by its desire for revenue sharing, so Safari users get stuck with fewer choices that are arguably lower quality and less private.
One other possibility is that Apple’s nominal desire for simplicity in preferences led to the company ignoring requests for an arguably niche feature like a custom search engine. Yet Safari preferences are complex and messy in other ways, and the company has — thankfully — retained legacy features like user stylesheets. Even if revenue sharing discouraged Apple from developing this feature, how many people are actually going to set a custom search engine, and would they have a meaningful impact on its beloved Google revenue stream? My guesses: very few, and I doubt it. Yet here we are, over twenty years after Safari’s launch, and we can generously choose between five search engines, of which three — Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo — are dependent on the same index.
Apple’s reluctance to add this feature to Safari is one of the main reasons I am so thankful for DuckDuckGo’s bang operations, of which there are hundreds just for other search engines. It is not identical to configuring a custom search engine — a query is still being passed through DuckDuckGo before being sent to the third-party engine — but it is frequently useful.
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Engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private. The iPhone maker also has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.
On first glance, these ideas are weird, right? I can see the appeal of things like these, especially for people with disabilities or who are older. But they do not really fit my expectations of a typical Apple product, which are often designed for mass markets, and to recede into a lived environment instead of being so conspicuous. Yet Gurman followed up in August with news this is something the company is actually interested in.
Then last month, on its Machine Learning Research blog, Apple published a post describing “ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-Anthropomorphic Robot”, and a companion paper that helps explain the forced acronym. Embedded in the post is a video that, indeed, shows a table-mounted lamp that responds to a user’s gestures. It is really quite something.
This is nominally research about making a robot’s movements less — uh — robotic. The result is a lamp that more than one publication has compared to the charming Pixar intro. It is very cool — but it is still very weird. Apple almost never shows works-in-progress, and what is posted to its research blog does not necessarily correlate to real-world products. Also, I am not accustomed to this much whimsy in anything Apple has released for at least a decade. It is refreshing.
In addition, Unread can call any shortcut, with attributes pertaining to an article or a link inside an article. Write a shortcut that saves an article to another bookmarking or read later service, that saves links to your own link management system, that drafts a social media post, or that sends a link to a friend.
On a Mac and on an iPad with a hardware keyboard, you can set a custom keyboard shortcut for each article action and for each shortcut.
Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
This order was based on capabilities granted by the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, though the Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, allows the U.K. government to make similarly broad access demands. That there are at least two wide-ranging laws that compel technical workarounds to end-to-end encryption belies the government’s claim of supporting users’ privacy.
I want to nitpick the final sentence I quoted above from Menn’s article:
[…] Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.
Based on its wording, it is possible this is a rephrasing of something Menn was told by a source, so I do not want to put too much weight on it. Menn also discusses the privacy implications to users later in the article. But it does not make sense to think of this as a “defeat for tech companies”. It poisons the well. Tech companies are — correctly — facing more of the kind of scrutiny expected of any world-dominating market leaders. It is not just industry giants and criminals who are concerned about such extraordinary access.
The UK Investigatory Powers Act, dubbed the “Snoopers’ Charter” by critics when it was passed in 2016, was updated last year in the final weeks of the Conservative government before July’s election.
Under the legislation, which has been widely criticised by human rights campaigners and privacy activists as well as Silicon Valley tech companies, recipients of technical capability notices are not allowed to acknowledge their existence or warn users that their security had been weakened, unless the Secretary of State grants permission to do so.
Establishing this as a fight between tech companies and governments minimizes the widespread opposition from experts in privacy and security. In turn, that minimizes the effects it will have on actual users. We should expect our information is secured against third-party access. Given the number of companies involved in storing and transmitting user data, there ought to be no difference between a warrant to access someone’s personal data on a drive in their physical possession and one for a server in a data centre. Those legal protections ought to be similarly strong.
However, I wonder if there is any room for compromise. Maybe I will regret writing this. Here is the thing: the higher security offered by Advanced Data Protection only applies to collaborative features in limited cases, but one of those is Notes, which has a substantial feature set these days — a user can embed pictures and attach documents. I think it makes sense if Advanced Data Protection could apply to documents shared with all users within, say, the same iCloud Family. I do not know that it makes sense to extend those protections to a larger and less connected group. I expect there are some limits to the number of users a note can be shared between, given limits on similar iCloud features and Shared Albums, though I could not find any relevant documentation. There are good reasons a group of otherwise disconnected people might want shared access to a very secure document; I can think of use cases among dissidents, activists, and journalists, for example. But I can also see how sharing could lead to abuse.
In any case, the reported demands by the U.K. government are an extraordinary abuse of their own. It has global implications for both U.K. access and, I would venture, access by its allies. As a reminder, U.S. and U.K. spy agencies routinelyshared collected data while avoiding domestic legal protections. This order explicitly revives the bad old days of constant access.
NowSecure has conducted a comprehensive security and privacy assessment of the DeepSeek iOS mobile app, uncovering multiple critical vulnerabilities that put individuals, enterprises, and government agencies at risk. These findings highlight the immediate need for organizations to prohibit the app’s use to safeguard sensitive data and mitigate potential cyber risks.
NowSecure’s most pressing concerns have little to do with the app’s country of origin, and a lot more to do with basic things like HTTP requests:
The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels. Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over internet.
Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”
You can discourse and quote-dunk and fact-check until you’re blue in the face, but at a certain point, you have to stop and decide what truth you believe in. The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information. As the internet continues to enshittify, maybe what we really need is to start trusting each other and our own collective sense of what is true and good.
I think it is reasonable to approach the bleak reality in which many now live — or, for some of us, will soon — differently depending on our style. “Posters post”. Some people work things out by brain dumping. Some people — me included — have a brain fried by too much news, too fast, all the time, and we are just trying to cope. None of that is bad or wrong.
However, Rose is correct in writing that information needs to eventually be turned into action. That might look different for different people, but it rarely looks like a sick dunk hinging on a technical definition. I do not think stop posting, start acting is easy, nor is it right for everyone. But we need to recognize there are far more people who, despite disagreements, have common goals in opposition to far-right authoritarians than there are those who agree with them.
Update:Sandy Allen has good advice on what can help.
To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made.
I know I just wrote about the mistakes of idolizing business leaders. True enough, there are some pretty odious people named in this article, and some of Foster’s more aspirational qualities are called into question. This is a great profile nonetheless: well-written, comprehensive, and full of wonderful details.
My problem with timeline apps is that I struggle to understand their pitch as alternatives to browsing Mastodon and Bluesky (supported by both Tapestry and Reeder) when they don’t support key functionalities of those services such as posting, replying, reposting, or marking items as favorites.
[…]
But: the beauty of the open web and the approach embraced by Tapestry and Reeder is that there are plenty of potential use cases to satisfy everyone. Crucially, this includes people who are not like me. There is no one-size-fits-all approach here because the web isn’t built like that.
I, too, think an all-in-one client would be a nice addition to my home screen. This is the advantage of separating the data layer from its presentation, however — there exists plenty of opportunity for different takes. I am currently testing Flashes, an app which connects to Bluesky or other (hypothetical) AT Protocol systems and shows only photo and video posts. I do not want to follow the same people for both text and photography, but that is okay because Bluesky has enough filtering options to create a different experience in different apps. I could see a similar app pulling together photos from different ActivityPub-based services, too.
Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even without developers` knowledge.
I looked into the list (link here) and found at least 3 apps I have installed on my iPhone. Take a look for yourself!
This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.
Unfortunately, it is very expensive for a typical person to buy this kind of data. Still, “Tim” spent some time dissecting the HTTPS requests from a single game. You probably will not be surprised by how much is revealed even with App Tracking Transparency preventing access to a user’s advertising identifier, yet it is quite something to see it all displayed like this.
I know advertising is an important revenue stream — often the only revenue stream — for many products and services. This, though, is not just advertising. It is a staggering abuse of trust happening all the time with — in many regions — almost no control or transparency. Absorbing or resharing this much private information should be criminal.
Prior to this, screens were large and encumbered. Classic TVs were housed in cabinets and were more furniture than centerpieces. They’ve become slimmer and larger over the decades but for the most part are still primarily active devices. One turns on a TV to watch something. A TV doesn’t necessarily reach out to you. It’s a consumption device. It generally is turned off.
Now, a small screen, or a larger one as a tablet, sits positioned. A phone is usually on, 24/7, 365 days a year. A person may choose to have it in a cradle propped up for display. Screens and battery have made it such that always-on is a feature, and no longer a decision. It acts as a supposed gateway to connection: access to the broader world as you know it.
This is a great piece, with a bunch of lovely ideas. There are plenty of people I know who say they want to use their phones less often, and have come up with techniques for making their phone time more intentional. If this does not describe you, that is fine; I have no judgement of anyone’s technology use unless their doing so puts me at risk. Please do not use your phone while driving.
These can be little changes, like keeping your phone in your bag or pocket in the elevator, or — as Hamid does — placing it face-down instead of face-up. One change I really appreciate is turning off my history on YouTube, which also blanks its homepage. Because I am logged out and, therefore, cannot see any subscriptions, this change means I need to deliberately search. It means my YouTube use becomes very specific. I never have any guilt about my time on YouTube, but I like the idea of making it an intentional decision instead of an idle one.
The web has always been in a state of flux, but the rate of change around how people connect has accelerated over the past few years. Centralized systems have shown their weakness and siloed content has as much a chance of surviving as “You’ve got mail!”.
Tapestry was built with this change in mind. Your content comes from a lot of different places, and how that data is retrieved from a feed is entirely customizable. Our goal was to put RSS, social media, podcasts, and more into a flexible and easy-to-read timeline. Tapestry syncs this variety of feeds across devices in a way that is seamless, secure, and easy to understand.
I am not sure I want all of these things inside a single app’s timeline. I typically want to treat reading web feeds as a discrete task, for example, and I would use a dedicated podcast client instead. But I like the idea of a merged social media feed. Some people have accounts on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog, while others are on only one of those services. I would often like to see all of them at the same time.
Tapestry reminds me of Twitterrific in a lot of ways, and is conceptually similar to the new Reeder. I do not care for the default font and I am a little peeved the system font is behind a paywall, but it is making me consider a subscription so maybe it is working as intended. What I would really like — and I do not mean to sound ungrateful or demanding — is a MacOS client. There are many excellent Mastodon clients for iOS, and the first-party Bluesky app is good as well. But the MacOS Bluesky client ecosystem is disappointingly weak, especially if you still use an Intel-based model.
The good news is that this is a burgeoning category of apps. That makes me very excited. The material published on social media has been tied for too long to the platforms themselves. That is true in part because of advertising revenue, but also because platform owners do not trust users. Instead of being allowed control over our experiences, we are required to endure the changes du jour. A social web built on open protocols is an opportunity to change all of that. Bring it on.
Adobe has updated the Acrobat AI Assistant, giving it the ability to understand contracts and to compare them for you. The company says it can help you make sense of complex terms and spot differences between agreements, such as between old and new ones, so you can understand what you’re signing. With the AI Assistant enabled, the Acrobat app will be able to recognize if a document is a contract, even if it’s a scanned page. It can identify and list key terms from there, summarize the document’s contents and recommend questions you can ask based on what’s in it.
Raise your hand if you would sign a contract — a legally binding document — based on the way an A.I. system understands it. Anyone? If this flags anything at all, you will probably need to check with a lawyer for a reliable opinion, and they cost way more than five dollars per month. No judge is going to sympathize with a misunderstanding because Adobe’s A.I. product summarized it all wrong.
The ‘Twitter Files’ Authors Only Pretend to Care About Power
Do you remember the “Twitter Files”?
I completely understand if you do not. Announced with great fanfare by Elon Musk after his eager-then-reluctant takeover of the company, writers like Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss were permitted access to internal records of historic moderation decisions. Each published long Twitter threads dripping in gravitas about their discoveries.
But after stripping away the breathless commentary and just looking at the documents as presented, Twitter’s actions did not look very evil after all. Clumsy at times, certainly, but not censorial — just normal discussions about moderation. Contrary to Taibbi’s assertions, the “institutional meddling” was research, not suppression.
Now, Musk works for the government’s DOGE temporary organization and has spent the past two weeks — just two weeks — creating chaos with vast powers and questionable legality. But that is just one of his many very real jobs. Another one is his ownership of X where he also has an executive role. Today, he decided to accuse another user of committing a crime, and used his power to suspend their account.
What was their “crime”? They quoted a Wired story naming six very young people who apparently have key roles at DOGE despite their lack of experience. The full tweetread:1
Here’s a list of techies on the ground helping Musk gaining and using access to the US Treasury payment system.
Akash Bobba
Edward Coristine
Luke Farritor
Gautier Cole Killian
Gavin Kliger
Ethan Shaotran
I wonder if the fired FBI agents may want dox them and maybe pay them a visit.
In the many screenshots I have seen of this tweet, few seem to include the last line as it is cut off by the way X displays it. Clicking “Show more” would have displayed it. It is possible to interpret this as violative of X’s Abuse and Harassment rules, which “prohibit[s] behavior that encourages others to harass or target specific individuals or groups of people with abuse”, including “behavior that urges offline action”.
X, as Twitter before it, enforces these policies haphazardly. The same policy also “prohibit[s] content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place”, but searching “Sandy Hook” or “Building 7” turns up loads of tweets which would presumably also run afoul. Turns out moderation of a large platform is hard and the people responsible sometimes make mistakes.
But the ugly suggestion made in that user’s post might not rise to the level of a material threat — a “crime”, as it were — and, so, might still be legal speech. Musk’s X also suspended a user who just posted the names of public servants. And Musk is currently a government employee in some capacity. The “Twitter Files” crew, ostensibly concerned about government overreach at social media platforms, should be furious about this dual role and heavy-handed censorship.
It was at this point in drafting this article that Mike Masnick of Techdirt published his impressions much faster than I could turn it around. I have been bamboozled by my day job. Anyway:
Let’s be crystal clear about what just happened: A powerful government official who happens to own a major social media platform (among many other businesses) just declared that naming government employees is criminal (it’s not) and then used his private platform to suppress that information. These aren’t classified operatives — they’re public servants who, theoretically, work for the American people and the Constitution, not Musk’s personal agenda.
This doesn’t just “seem like” a First Amendment issue — it’s a textbook example of what the First Amendment was designed to prevent.
So far, however, we have seen from the vast majority of them no exhausting threads, no demands for public hearings — in fact, barely anything. To his extremely limited credit, Taibbi did acknowledge it is “messed up”, going on to write:
That new-car free speech smell is just about gone now.
“Now”?
Taibbi is the only one of those authors who has written so much as a tweet about Musk’s actions. Everyone else — Fang, Shellenberger, Subramanya, and Weiss — has moved on to unsubstantive commentary about newer and shinier topics.
This is not mere hypocrisy. What Musk is doing is a far more explicit blurring of the lines between government power and platform speech permissions. This could be an interesting topic that a writer on the free speech beat might want to explore. But for a lot of them, it would align them too similarly to mainstream reporting, and their models do not permit that.
It is one of the problems with being a shallow contrarian. Because these writers must position themselves as alternatives to mainstream news coverage — “focus[ing] on stories that are ignored or misconstrued in the service of an ideological narrative”, “for people who dare to think for themselves”. How original. They suggest they cannot cover the same news — or, at least, not from a similar perspective — as in the mainstream. This is not actually true, of course: each of them frequently publishes hot takes about high-profile stories along their particular ideological bent, which often coincide with standard centre-right to right-wing thought. They are not unbiased. Yet this widely covered story has either escaped their attention, or they have mostly decided it is not worth mentioning.
I am not saying this is a conspiracy among these writers, or that they are lackeys for Musk or Trump. What I am saying is that their supposed principles are apparently only worth expressing when they are able to paint them as speaking truth to power, and their concept of power is warped beyond recognition. It goes like this: some misinformation researchers partially funded by government are “power”, but using the richest man in the world as a source is not. It also goes like this: when that same man works for the government in a quasi-official capacity and also owns a major social media platform, it is not worth considering those implications because Rolling Stone already has an article.
They can prove me wrong by dedicating just as much effort to exposing the blurrier-than-ever lines between a social media platform and the U.S. government. Instead, it is busy reposting glowing profiles of now-DOGE staff. They are not interested in standing for specific principles when knee-jerk contrarianism is so much more thrilling.
There are going to be a lot of x.com links in this post, as it is rather unavoidable. ↥︎
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment — the “vibe in the room” — regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)
This is the tenth year Snell has run this; the first was for 2015. Over that time — and you can see this reflected in graphs in the 2024 edition — the reputation of Macs and Apple’s services has soared, Home products and software quality continue to be pretty meh, and developer relations and reception of the company’s societal impact has cratered. The vibe in the room is not great.
I continue to be impressed by how much work Snell puts into this every year. There are some changes to the survey and its reporting this time. Notably, the full commentary from all panellists who wanted to be quoted has been published separately. Maybe you think this is a lot of words, but consider how much sixty-ish commentators would write if you gave them an empty text box to rant in, and I think you will agree we all showed admirable restraint.
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Yesterday, I published a little thing about how Quartz slipped and fell into a toxic stew of A.I. slop. If you have not yet read it, I must say I quite like it. What began as a little link I was going to throw to Riley MacLeod’s article became an exploration of an A.I.-generated article with at least two completely fictional sources, as far as I can tell.
Anyway, that article is still up — unchanged — and it still claims “new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March”.
Trump launched a trade war against Canada earlier Saturday by imposing a 25 per cent tariff on virtually all goods from this country — an unprecedented strike against a long-standing ally that has the potential to throw the economy into a tailspin.
[…]
These potentially devastating tariffs are slated to take effect on Tuesday and remain in place until Trump is satisfied Canada is doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S.
I think you have to see “fentanyl” in this context as the equivalent of “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the invasion of Iraq. It’s not the real reason; Canada isn’t even a major source of fentanyl. It’s just a plausible-sounding reason for a president to do what he wanted to do for other reasons — George W. Bush wanted a splendid little war, Donald Trump just wants to impose tariffs and assert dominance.
The president posted today that “Canada should become our Cherished 51st State”, effectively saying the tariffs are part of a hostile takeover strategy. And, sure, maybe he does not mean it; maybe if he gets a series of special edition Trump-branded Timbits, he will call the whole thing off. But we are now on the receiving end of economic warfare from the world’s most powerful nation, and an explicit threat of far worse.
The stance of the Trump administration only exacerbates the growing recognition that allowing US companies to dominate the internet economy across much of the world was a terrible mistake. The harms that have come of that model — for workers, users, and the wider society — have already shone a spotlight on the problems of importing poorly regulated internet platforms based on American norms and practices. But now more than ever it’s clear that cannot continue, and traditional allies of the United States need to come together not just to take on its tech industry, but to protect themselves from a declining superpower that’s decided it can do whatever it wants — even to those it recently called friends.
I maintain my disagreement with the U.S. requirement that TikTok divest or be banned, and will continue to do so until there is compelling evidence to reconsider. There is currently nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, U.S. tech companies and executives are aligning themselves with this adversarial administration, some more than others. I am not saying we ought to require Canadian versions of Meta’s apps or X. But can users trust their recommendations systems?
It is folly for me, an idiot, to offer geopolitical analysis, so I will anyway. There are a handful of world powers worth worrying about: Russia, and its territorial expansion; China, and its manufacturing dominance combined with human rights abuses. The U.S. has long been on that list for anyone living in Southeast Asia, and Central and South America, formerly, and then the Middle East, and Africa now, too. But those of us in developed nations or who have been allies have had it easy; we have only needed to worry about its potential for demonstrating its power. Now, it has. Yet we are all reading about it using devices running U.S. software. I do not like thinking in these terms — the internet was supposed to be a grand unifier — but here we are.
Quartz’s A.I. Slop
The downfall of Quartz is really something to behold. It was launched in 2012 as a digital-only offshoot of the Atlantic specifically intended for business and economic news. It compared itself to esteemed publications like the Economist and Financial Times, and had a clever-for-early-2010s URL.1 It had an iPad-first layout. Six years later, it and “its own bot studio” were sold to Uzabase for a decent sum. But the good times did not last, and Quartz was eventually sold to G/O Media.
As of publishing, the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom” has written 22 articles today, running the gamut from earnings reports to Reddit communities banning Twitter posts to the Sackler settlement to, delightfully, a couple articles about how much AI sucks. Quartz has been running AI-generated articles for months, but prior to yesterday, they appear to have been limited to summaries of earnings reports rather than news articles. Boilerplate at the bottom of these articles notes that “This is the first phase of an experimental new version of reporting. While we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard.”
MacLeod published this story last week, and I thought it would be a good time to check in on how it is going. So I opened the latest article from the “Quartz Intelligence Newsroom”, “Expected new tariffs will mean rising costs for everyday items”. It was published earlier today, and says at the top it “incorporates reporting from Yahoo, NBC Chicago and The Wall Street Journal on MSN.com”. The “Yahoo” story is actually a syndicated video from NBC’s Today Show, so that is not a great start as far as crediting sources goes.
Let us tediously dissect this article, beginning with the first paragraph:
As new tariffs are slated to take effect in early March, consumers in the U.S. can expect price increases on a variety of everyday items. These tariffs, imposed in a series of trade policy shifts, are anticipated to affect numerous sectors of the economy. The direct cost of these tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods ranging from electronics to household items.
The very first sentence of this article appears to be wrong. The tariffs in question are supposed to be announced today, as stated in that Today Show clip, and none of the cited articles say anything about March. While a Reuters “exclusive” yesterday specified a March 1 enforcement date, the White House denied that report, with the president saying oil and gas tariffs would begin “around the 18 of February”.
To be fair to the robot writing the Quartz article, the president does not know what he is talking about. You could also see how a similar mistake could be made by a human being who read the Reuters story or has sources saying something similar. But the Quartz article does not cite Reuters — it, in fact, contains no links aside from those in the disclaimer quoted above — nor does it claim to have any basis for saying March.
The next paragraph is where things take a sloppier turn; see if you can spot it:
Data from recent analyses indicate that electronics, such as smartphones and laptops, will be among the most impacted by the new tariffs. Importers of these goods face increased costs, which they are poised to transfer to consumers. A report by the U.K.-based research firm Tech Analytics suggests that consumers might see price hikes of up to 15% on popular smartphone models and up to 10% on laptops. These increases are expected to influence consumer purchasing decisions, possibly leading to a decrease in sales volume.
If you are wondering why an article about U.S. tariffs published by a U.S. website is citing a U.K. source, you got the same weird vibe as I did. So I looked it up. And, as best I can tell, there is no U.K. research organization called “Tech Analytics” — none at all. There used to be and, because it was only dissolved in October, it is possible Tech Analytics could be a report from around then based on the president’s campaign statements. But I cannot find any record of Tech Analytics publishing anything whatsoever, or being cited in any news stories. This report does not exist.
I also could not find any source for the figures in this paragraph. Last month, the U.S. Consumer Technology Association published a report (PDF) exploring the effects of these tariffs on U.S. consumer goods. Analysis by Trade Partnership Worldwide indicated the proposed tariffs would raise the price of smartphones by 26–37%, and laptops by 46–68%. These figures assumed a rate of 70–100% on goods from China because that is what the president said he would do. He more recently said 10% tariffs should be expected, and that could mean smartphone prices really do increase by the amount in the Quartz article. However, there is again no (real) source or citation for those numbers.
As far as I can tell, Quartz, a business and financial news website, published a made-up source and some numbers in an article about a high-profile story. If a real person reviewed this story before publication, their work is not evident. Why should a reader trust anything from Quartz ever again?
Let us continue a couple of paragraphs later:
The automotive sector is also preparing for the impact of increased tariffs. Car manufacturers and parts suppliers are bracing for higher production costs as tariffs on imported steel and aluminum take hold. According to a February report from the Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S., vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500. This increase stems from the higher costs of materials that are critical to vehicle manufacturing and assembly.
Does the phrase “according to a February report” sound weird to you on the first of February? It does to me, too. Would it surprise you if I told you the “Automobile Manufacturers Association of the U.S.” does not exist? There was a U.S. trade group by the name of “Automobile Manufacturers Association” until 1999, according to Stan Luger in “Corporate Power, American Democracy, and the Automobile Industry”.2 There are also several current industry groups, none of which are named anything similar. This organization and its report do not exist. If they do, please tell me, but I found nothing relevant.
What about the figure itself, though — “vehicle prices might go up by an average of $1,500”? Again, I cannot find any supporting evidence. None of the sources cited in this article contain this number. A November Bloomberg story cites a Wolfe Research note in reporting new cars will be about $3,000 more expensive, not $1,500, at the same proposed rate as the White House is expected to announce today.
Again, I have to ask why anyone should trust Quartz with their financial news. I know A.I. makes mistakes and, as MacLeod quotes them saying, Quartz does too: “[w]hile we strive for accuracy and timeliness, due to the experimental nature of this technology we cannot guarantee that we’ll always be successful in that regard”.
This is the first article I checked, and I gave up after the fourth paragraph and two entirely fictional sources of information. Maybe the rest of the Quartz Intelligence Newsroom’s output is spotless and I got unlucky.
But — what a downfall for Quartz. Once positioning itself as the Economist for the 2010s, it is now publishing stuff that is made up by a machine and, apparently, is passed unchecked to the web for other A.I. scrapers to aggregate. G/O Media says it publishes “editorial content and conduct[s its] day-to-day business activities with the UTMOST INTEGRITY”. I disagree. I think we will struggle to understand for a long time how far and how fast standards have fallen. This is trash.
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The 227 entries we received from contestants — including from Mongolia, the Philippines, Argentina, and Jordan — not only celebrate these stories but reaffirm our commitment at Rest of World to challenge stereotypes about how people use technology in their daily lives.
A whirlwind of emotions here in just nine selected images. Tremendous documentary work.
“For the longest time I’ve been satisfied and chill,” he [Tom Anderson] later wrote on IG. “Just at peace with how I am and how the world is.”
In comments like these, I see the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom. Today’s tech founders live largely to extract and hoard: more profits, more influence, more data. I think of the image of Musk, Zuckerberg and others at Trump’s recent inauguration. I think, too, of the billionaire investor Marc Andreessen’s claim that mega-successful entrepreneurs are also entitled to public adulation. Nothing is ever quite enough for these people; the trend line must always go up. That Myspace Tom defied that mandate and fucked off to Hawaii feels unusually decent, if not straight-up heroic.
It was a mistake for us to indulge the business leaders craving celebrity despite also having lots of money and lots of power. Perhaps you do not believe they ought to be considered enemies — though there is a strong case to be made for that — but they are assuredly not our friends. Their ruthless behaviour is not aspirational.
