U.S. Judge Rules NSO Group Is Liable for Spyware Delivered via WhatsApp ⇥ therecord.media

Suzanne Smalley, the Record:

The developer of the powerful Pegasus spyware was found liable on Friday for its role in the infection of devices belonging to 1,400 WhatsApp users.

The precedent-setting ruling from a Northern California federal judge could lead to massive damages against NSO Group, whose notorious spyware has been reportedly used, and often abused, by a roster of anonymous government clients worldwide.

Apple dropped its similar suit against NSO Group in September on the grounds it believed it would be unable to compel the production of evidence. But the judge in WhatsApp’s case, Phyllis J. Hamilton, was correctly furious (PDF) about NSO Group’s behaviour:

Overall, the court concludes that defendants have repeatedly failed to produce relevant discovery and failed to obey court orders regarding such discovery. Most significant is the Pegasus source code, and defendants’ position that their production obligations were limited to only the code on the AWS server is a position that the court cannot see as reasonable given the history and context of the case. Moreover, defendants’ limitation of its production such that it is viewable only by Israeli citizens present in Israel is simply impracticable for a lawsuit that is to be litigated in this district.

Accordingly, the court concludes that plaintiffs’ motion for sanctions must be GRANTED. […]

I am not a lawyer, and it seems Apple’s — presumably, very expensive — representation had good reason to worry about this case. But I wish they would have pursued it. It would have been nice to see NSO Group on the receiving end of two of these rulings instead of just one.

‘Ghosts’ of Spotify ⇥ harpers.org

Liz Pelly, Harpers:

According to a source close to the company, Spotify’s own internal research showed that many users were not coming to the platform to listen to specific artists or albums; they just needed something to serve as a soundtrack for their days, like a study playlist or maybe a dinner soundtrack. In the lean-back listening environment that streaming had helped champion, listeners often weren’t even aware of what song or artist they were hearing. As a result, the thinking seemed to be: Why pay full-price royalties if users were only half listening? It was likely from this reasoning that the Perfect Fit Content program was created.

After at least a year of piloting, PFC was presented to Spotify editors in 2017 as one of the company’s new bets to achieve profitability. According to a former employee, just a few months later, a new column appeared on the dashboard editors used to monitor internal playlists. The dashboard was where editors could view various stats: plays, likes, skip rates, saves. And now, right at the top of the page, editors could see how successfully each playlist embraced “music commissioned to fit a certain playlist/mood with improved margins,” as PFC was described internally.

Reading this article made me feel quite sad. The musicians responsible for tracks like these seem quite talented. Browsing the roster of Epidemic Sound — one of the production companies cited in Pelly’s story — indicates many of them are working in multiple genres. I did not hear anything particularly interesting or notable, but I do not want to suggest this is bad; there is a valid place for stock tracks. And, though this article focuses on Spotify, there is no shortage of Epidemic’s music and that of similar production companies in Apple Music playlists, either.

Despite their skill, none of these musicians make very much money from Epidemic Sound, according to Pelly, or in payouts from streaming companies. That is not a unique situation — streaming notoriously pays nearly all artists poorly — though it seems like an ongoing part of the devaluation of music. Filler tracks have long been commonplace, but they used to be confined to production libraries, not placed side-by-side with recognizable artists. For many musicians to earn enough, they become contributors to their own downfall.

(Via Jason Tate.)

Never Forgive Them ⇥ wheresyoured.at

Ed Zitron:

The tools we use in our daily lives outside of our devices have mostly stayed the same. While buttons on our cars might have moved around — and I’m not even getting into Tesla’s designs right now — we generally have a brake, an accelerator, a wheel, and a turn signal. Boarding an airplane has worked mostly the same way since I started flying, other than moving from physical tickets to digital ones. We’re not expected to work out “the new way to use a toilet” every few months because somebody decided we were finishing too quickly.

Yet our apps and the platforms we use every day operate by a totally different moral and intellectual compass. While the idea of an update is fairly noble (and not always negative) — that something you’ve bought can be maintained and improved over time is a good thing — many tech platforms see it as a means to further extract and exploit, to push users into doing things that either keep them on the app longer or take more-profitable actions.

A barn-burner of an essay, and a perfect way to summarize this year — this decade, just about — in technology. One may quibble with individual examples — I, for one, cannot remotely co-sign “[t]he destruction of Google Search […] should be written about like a war crime” — but the industry-wide trend leads directly to Zitron’s deserved and palpable frustration.

With my limited understanding of economics terms, I think of this in the context of reducing consumer surplus. A straightforward example is to increase prices — smartphone makers, for example, recognized years ago they were leaving money on the table and would have no problem selling phones for well over a thousand dollars.

Some of these software companies have figured out they are also charging less than they could. Microsoft Office used to cost $200 in the United States for an indefinite license. It is now $70 per year which means, after three years, users are paying more than the previous one-time fee. Adobe’s Creative Suite used to cost a whopping $2,600; the current pricing for Creative Cloud is $660 per year. But after four years, Creative Cloud costs more. There are advantages to subscription pricing, like ongoing updates; there are also disadvantages, like being required to pay indefinitely to continue using their features. Depending on how often one upgrades, they might find subscription pricing less expensive in the long run, but the choice is no longer theirs.

Remarkably, the consumer surplus is not closed solely through increased dollar amounts. There are, as Zitron ably documents, plenty of non-financial costs, too. I expect this to some extent in free-to-use products, but it infects everything. I am, in the long term, paying more to be annoyed more often — to the huge benefit of these corporations.

Music Year-End Lists ⇥ albumoftheyear.org

The end of the year is an exciting time because, try as I might, I cannot possibly listen to all the records released in a year. That means I miss a whole bunch of terrific albums until they are mentioned in some year-end roundup. These are some of my favourites:

  • The main link on this post goes to Album of the Year and its aggregate roundup of critics’ picks. You already know which album is number one.

  • The Quietus published its quirky-as-usual list earlier this month. There are also several genre-specific lists. Their picks are sometimes hard to like, but never boring.

  • Gramophone last week posted its picks for the best classical albums of the year. It is a big list and, even skimming it, I think there is something in there for just about everyone.

  • Anthony Fantano has begun List Week with some honourable mentions and his favourite EPs of the year. New videos daily with the best — and worst — the year had to offer.

I am sure there are terrific records that do not appear on any of these lists, just as I am sure there are album rankings you reference instead. If there is one you think I would like, please let me know. So far, these are the lists I prefer to help me find great albums I missed in 2024.

Mark Zuckerberg Says Threads Has 100 Million Daily Active Users ⇥ threads.net

Mark Zuckerberg:

Threads strong momentum continues — now 300M+ monthly actives and 100M+ daily actives 💪

It looks like I was right to be skeptical of data from Similarweb which, a few weeks ago, said Threads’ daily user count in the U.K. and U.S. was only one-and-a-half times larger than Bluesky’s 3.5 million. Maybe there really are only 5.25 million Threads users in the U.S. and the other 95 million daily active users are elsewhere, but I doubt it.

Then again, who says Meta and Similarweb are measuring daily users in the same way? Meta is incentivized to inflate its figures to the maximum extent legally allowable. Does this count the number of people who viewed a Threads post as suggested in Instagram? I doubt it. I would like to see both companies show their work, however.

The Verge’s Tom Warren on Threads:

[A]pparently there are 100 million daily active users of Threads. I wonder how this is counted, and how many actually engage with Threads content every day. I wonder because Bluesky still feels a lot more alive than Threads, despite having a lot less users.

Bluesky, at the very least, does not feel like it is full of people trying to replace a lack of personality with Facebook-grade memes and a business consulting side hustle.

Telegram Publishes a Dashboard of Daily Moderation Actions ⇥ techcrunch.com

Charles Rollet, TechCrunch:

After announcing a crackdown in September, Telegram now says it has removed 15.4 million groups and channels related to harmful content like fraud and terrorism in 2024, noting this effort was “enhanced with cutting-edge AI moderation tools.”

This makes more sense to me if “A.I.” stands for “arrested and indicted”.

Telegram launched a new moderation dashboard. The charts are all shown with daily granularity and you can adjust the date range, but it is hard to get a clear sense of a trend. Rollet reports “there’s a noticeable increase in enforcement after Durov’s arrest in August”, but I am not sure that is so clear. I wanted to find out.

Happily, the chart source data is exposed in the page’s markup. A little copying-and-pasting and a little cleaning up yielded a Numbers document you can download with figures from December 2023 up to yesterday.1 The trend line shows a modest increase in total moderation actions and banned terrorism communities. CSAM bans are, however, slightly declining.

  1. The site shows zero bans for CSAM and terrorism-related groups for today, but no other day has anything close to zero, so I assume this is an issue of incomplete data. I removed them. ↥︎

WP Engine Wins Preliminary Injunction in Fight With Automattic ⇥ tedium.co

Thomas Claburn, the Register:

WordPress hosting firm Automattic and its CEO Matthew Mullenweg have been ordered to stop interfering with the business of rival WP Engine.

California District Court judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction [PDF] against Automattic and Mullenweg, finding that plaintiff WP Engine is likely to prevail in its claims.

Ernie Smith, Tedium:

Mullenweg’s anger about this situation, well-documented at this point, is rooted in the private equity ownership of WP Engine and how he felt it would threaten to damage the open-source community his company had built. And to be clear, the people who own the platforms we rely on? That is a real issue. The idea that a large company can undermine an open-source project? Point to Mullenweg. He has reasons to be nervous.

But I don’t think that’s really what’s been happening here. I think the concern, if we’re really being honest, reflects frustration that Mullenweg has struggled to make Automattic into the firm that WP Engine has become — the first choice for businesses and agencies looking to get a site online. His actions since September — which, mind you, included building a website promoting the number of WP Engine users that had left that platform — have only come to underline that. And despite his claims otherwise, his actions have clearly spoken in the other direction.

To wit, Samantha Cole, 404 Media:

WordPress co-founder and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg is trolling contributors and users of the WordPress open-source project by requiring them to check a box that says “Pineapple is delicious on pizza.”

The change was spotted by WordPress contributors late Sunday, and is still up as of Monday morning. Trying to log in or create a new account without checking the box returns a “please try again” error.

It is still there now.

Nobody seems to know why this checkbox was changed rather than being removed, but this change was not Mullenweg’s doing — at least, not directly. No reason was provided by the responsible contributor. And this is the CMS upon which over 40% of the web is built, in the hands of these clowns?

Canadian Addresses Are Being Used by Fraudulent Companies to Launder Cryptocurrency ⇥ theijf.org

Zak Vescera and Adrian Ghobrial, Investigative Journalism Foundation:

An IJF and CTV National News investigation has found 422 Richards St. is one of dozens of cases across Canada where multiple money services businesses (MSBs) are incorporated at the same address, sometimes without the knowledge or consent of the location’s actual occupant. 

Financial crime experts say it goes against the spirit of Canada’s registration requirements for such businesses, which are considered high-risk for money laundering and terrorist financing.

Brian Krebs:

According to [Richard] Sanders, all 122 of the services he tested are processing transactions through a company called Cryptomus, which says it is a cryptocurrency payments platform based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Cryptomus’ website says its parent firm — Xeltox Enterprises Ltd. (formerly certa-pay[.]com) — is registered as a money service business (MSB) with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC).

Sanders said the payment data he gathered also shows that at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.

Between this and TD Bank laundering drug money, Canada sure is making a name for itself as a great place for financial crime. We are not yet the United Kingdom but it is good to have aspirations I suppose.

Labellers Training A.I. Say They Are Overworked, Underpaid, and Exploited ⇥ cbsnews.com

The U.S. newsmagazine 60 Minutes recently broadcast a short segment about the silent human toll borne as a result of outsourced labelling for A.I. systems. I do not think it is as comprehensive to, for example, Josh Dzieza’s reporting last year — previously linked — but it is worth your time.

Fellow foreigners: I found yt-dlp quite useful.

Nerima Wako-Ojiwa, executive director of Siasa Place, interviewed by Lesley Stahl:

Our labor law is about 20 years old, it doesn’t touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it — but not just in Kenya alone. Because what happens is when we start to push back, in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country.

These workers are essential for making these systems function, but are treated as far more disposable by both their immediate employers and their clients: big, rich technology companies. They can and should do better for the people they depend on.

‘Do Not Track’ Removed From Firefox ⇥ arstechnica.com

Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica:

It might not ever be fully dead, but Firefox calling it quits on Do Not Track (DNT) is a strong indication that an idealistic movement born more than 13 years ago has truly reached the end of its viable life.

[…]

Besides lacking regulatory teeth, DNT was also generally overcome by advancements in tracking. All the signals put out by a browser — plug-ins, time zone, monitor resolution, even the DNT option itself — could be used to effectively track a user, even across browsers. Apple dropped DNT from Safari in 2019, citing both its ineffectiveness and fingerprinting.

Unfortunately, the replacement for Do Not Track — the Global Privacy Control — is not quickly catching on despite claiming to have “broad industry support” and legal might.

BBC Complains to Apple Over Misleading Shooting Headline ⇥ bbc.com

Graham Fraser, BBC News:

Apple Intelligence, launched in the UK earlier this week, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to summarise and group together notifications.

This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.

Fraser also points to an inaccurate summary attributed to the New York Times. Even scrolling through my notifications right now, I can see misleading summaries. One, interpreted by Apple Intelligence as a story about a “vaccine lawyer helps pick health officials”, actually refers to an anti-vaccine lawyer who thinks immunizing against polio is dangerous. I have seen far dumber examples since this feature became part of beta builds over the past months.

I am not opposed to the concept of summarized text. It can, in theory, be helpful to glance at my phone and know whether I need to respond to something sooner rather than later. But every error chips away at a user’s trust, to the point where they need to double-check for accuracy — at which point, the summary is creating additional work.

I can see why the BBC is upset about this, particularly after years of declining trust in media. I had notification summaries switched on for only select few apps. I have now ensured they are turned off for news apps.

Update: Markus Müller-Simhofer:

If you are using macOS 15.2, please be careful with those priority alerts. It listed a fraud email as priority for me.

This is not just a one-off. I have also seen this in my own use. Mail also repeatedly decided to prioritize “guest contributor” spam emails over genuinely useful messages like shipping notifications. Sometimes, it works as expected and is useful; sometimes, the priority message feature simply does not show up. It is bizarre.

Sora’s U.I. System ⇥ manton.org

Manton Reece:

Trying Sora. It’s extraordinary that this works at all, and it’s even faster than I was expecting. OpenAI seems to have built a whole UI system around this app too.

Something I neglected to mention in my thoughts about Sora from earlier this week — which spiralled into something else entirely — is this U.I. which, though new to OpenAI, feels familiar. In screen recordings, it looks strikingly like Apple’s Photos app for Mac and at iCloud on the web, right down to the way an item’s metadata is displayed. I am sure there are other applications that have a similar layout and appearance, but that was my immediate impression.

TCL Is Going to Generate and Stream A.I. Movies to Its Televisions for Targeted Advertising ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

TCL said it expects to sell 43 million televisions this year. To augment the revenue from its TV sales, it has created a free TV service called TCL+, which is supported by targeted advertising. A few months ago, TCL announced the creation of the TCL Film Machine, which is a studio that is creating AI-generated films that will run on TCL+. TCL invited me to the TCL Chinese Theater, which it now owns, to watch the first five AI-generated films that will air on TCL+ starting this week.

What an extraordinary paragraph. Tired of movies feeling increasingly derivative? Too bad; here are some that literally — by definition — are entirely so. You can watch all five on YouTube if you really want.

They are, with the exception of the visuals, short movies like any other. They were apparently written, directed, voice acted, and edited by real people. How long do you think TCL will maintain that level of investment?

Joe Rosensteel:

As for the obviously terrible quality, Jason brings up the ol’ “this is the worst it will ever be” chestnut, and [TCL’s] Chris agrees, and elaborates. What’s left unsaid with TCL’s approach is that this is the best the TCL Channel will ever be, because it’s optimizing for this quality level. They’re setting this as the bar. If Chris is to be believed, and that TCL will always employ roughly this same number of people to make something, then that would indicate to me that they’ll simply be able to make more videos of this quality, not the same number of videos at a higher quality.

In a world of slop and content, these truly seem like both. I feel a little uncomfortable writing that because people worked on them, but that is how they come across. All programming on broadcast television is, to some extent, the thing luring you in so you will also watch some ads. These movies are not that. Regardless of the technology behind them, they are simply poor movies. They are not much fun to watch and I am not sure why I would sit through ad breaks to see anything like these shorts.

In some sense, they function in basically the same way as A.I. TikTok spam. They can be produced at volume as TCL inevitably relies less on the human involvement in these examples. But would you rather watch Letterman re-runs instead?

Similarweb: U.S. Traffic to Bluesky and Threads Increases as X Slides ⇥ theguardian.com

Hannah Murphy and John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times:

Since election day, app usage of Bluesky in the US and UK skyrocketed by almost 300 per cent to 3.5mn daily users, according to data from research group Similarweb. The site was boosted as academics, journalists and left-leaning politicians abandoned X, whose billionaire owner is a prominent supporter of the president-elect.

Prior to November 5, Threads had five times more daily active users in the US than Bluesky, which has just 20 full-time staff and was initially funded by Twitter when Jack Dorsey was its chief executive. Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said.

Raphael Boyd, the Guardian:

A mass departure from Elon Musk’s X has led to the site losing about 2.7 million active Apple and Android users in the US in two months, with its rival social media platform Bluesky gaining nearly 2.5 million over the same period.

[…]

According to the digital market intelligence company Similarweb, the number of daily active US users on X has dropped by 8.4% since early October, from 32.3 million to 29.6 million.

These are interesting numbers from a questionable source. I wanted to check the work of Similarweb against user numbers reported by any tech company but, unsurprisingly, I could not find any overlap. Such figures would be both redundant if they were accurate and embarrassing if they were not.

Twitter stopped reporting monthly active users in early 2019 owing to steady declining numbers. In its then-most-recent figures, Twitter claimed between 66 and 69 million monthly active U.S. users — over twice as many as Similarweb reports X having now. However, despite their superficial similarity, the methodologies of these companies are likely very different; I could not find any pre-Musk monthly active user statistics for Twitter as reported by Similarweb for comparison. Also, do note the numbers in the first article — the one from the Times — are daily active users, not monthly.

These figures are clearly derived from something and not just made up. Even so, I would not read into them too much. But here is a bizarre possibility: perhaps all these traffic stats really are comparable. Maybe X has lost half its U.S. user base in the past five years, and services which did not exist then are growing fast. And even if Bluesky and Threads do not have as large a user base as X, it does not necessarily mean they are not meaningful. A perfect case study is Twitter itself, which has never had a user base like Facebook or Instagram. Even so, Twitter punched above its weight and swayed public conversation in a way Facebook rarely has, for better and worse.

The Generation Generation

A little over two years after OpenAI released ChatGPT upon the world, and about four years since Dall-E, the company’s toolset now — “finally” — makes it possible to generate video. Sora, as it is called, is not the first generative video tool to be released to the public; there are already offerings from Hotshot, Luma, Runway, and Tencent. OpenAI’s is the highest-profile so far, though: the one many people will use, and the products of which we will likely all be exposed to.

A generator of video is naturally best seen demonstrated in that format, and I think Marques Brownlee’s preview is a good place to start. The results are, as I wrote in February when Sora was first shown, undeniably impressive. No matter how complicated my views about generative A.I. — and I will get there — it is bewildering that a computer can, in a matter of seconds, transform noise into a convincing ten-second clip depicting whatever was typed into a text box. It can transform still images into video, too.

It is hard to see this as anything other than extraordinary. Enough has been written by now about “any sufficiently advanced technology [being] indistinguishable from magic” to bore, but this truly captures it in a Penn & Teller kind of way: knowing how it works only makes it somehow more incredible. Feed computers on a vast scale video which has been labelled — partly by people, and partly by automated means which are reliant on this exact same training process — and it can average that into entirely new video that often appears plausible.1 I am basing my assessment on the results generated by others because Sora requires a paid OpenAI account, and because there is currently a waiting list.

There are, of course, limitations of both technology and policy. Sora has problems with physics, the placement of objects in space, and consistency between and within shots. Sora does not generate audio, even though OpenAI has the capability. Prompts in text and images are checked for copyright violations, public figures’ likenesses, criminal usage, and so forth. But there is no meaningful restrictions on the video itself. This is not how things must be; this is a design decision.

I keep thinking about the differences between A.I. features and A.I. products. I use very few A.I. products; an open-ended image generator, for example, is technically interesting but not very useful to me. Unlike a crop of Substack writers, I do not think pretending to have commissioned art lends me any credibility. But I now use A.I. features on a regular basis, in part because so many things are now “A.I. features” in name and by seemingly no other quality. Generative Remove in Adobe Lightroom Classic, for example, has become a terrific part of my creative workflow. There are edits I sometimes want to make which, if not for this feature, would require vastly more time which, depending on the job, I may not have. It is an image generator just like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion, but it is limited by design.

Adobe is not taking a principled stance; Photoshop contains a text-based image generator which, I think, does not benefit from being so open-ended. It would, for me, be improved if its functionality were integrated into more specific tools; for example, the crop tool could also allow generative reframing.

Sora, like ChatGPT and Dall-E, is an A.I. product. But I would find its capabilities more useful and compelling if they were a feature within a broader video editing environment. Its existence implies a set of tools which could benefit a video editor’s workflow. For example, the object removal and tracking features in Premiere Pro feel more useful to me than its ability to generate b-roll, which just seems like a crappy excuse to avoid buying stock footage or paying for a second unit.

Limiting generative A.I. in this manner would also make its products more grounded in reality and less likely to be abused. It would also mean withholding capabilities. Clearly, there are some people who see a demonstration of the power of generative A.I. as a worthwhile endeavour unto itself. As a science experiment, I get it, but I do not think these open-ended tools should be publicly available. Alas, that is not the future venture capitalists, and shareholders, and — I guess — the creators of these products have decided is best for us.

We are now living in a world of slop, and we have been for some time. It began as infinite reams of text-based slop intended to be surfaced in search results. It became image-based slop which paired perfectly with Facebook’s pivot to TikTok-like recommendations. Image slop and audio slop came together to produce image slideshow slop dumped into the pipelines of Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts. Brace yourselves for a torrent of video slop about pyramids and the Bermuda triangle and pyramids. None of these were made using Sora, as far as I know; at least some were generated by Hailuo from Minimax. I had to dig a little bit for these examples, but not too much, and it is only going to get worse.

Much has been written about how all this generative stuff has the capability of manipulating reality — and rightfully so. It lends credence to lies, and its mere existence can cause unwarranted doubt. But there is another problem: all of this makes our world a little bit worse because it is cheap to produce in volume. We are on the receiving end of a bullshit industry, and the toolmakers see no reason to slow it down. Every big platform — including the web itself — is full of this stuff, and it is worse for all of us. Cynicism aside, I cannot imagine the leadership at Google or Meta actually enjoys using their own products as they wade through generated garbage.

This is hitting each of us in similar ways. If you use a computer that is connected to the internet, you are likely running into A.I.-generated stuff all the time, perhaps without being fully aware of it. The recipe you followed, the repair guide you found, the code you copy-and-pasted, and the images in the video you watched? Any of them could have been generated in a data farm somewhere. I do not think that is inherently bad, though it is an uncertain feeling.

I am part of the millennial generation. I grew up at a time in which we were told we were experiencing something brand new in world history. The internet allowed anyone to publish anything, and it was impossible to verify this new flood of information. We were taught to think critically and be cautious, since we never knew who created anything. Now we have a different problem: we are unsure what created anything.

  1. Without thinking about why it is the case, it is interesting how generative A.I. has no problem creating realistic-seeming text as text, but it struggles when it is an image containing text. But with a little knowledge about how these things work, that makes sense. ↥︎

I Goobered Up the RSS Feed Last Month, but I Think I Fixed It ⇥ pxlnv.com

The RSS feed for this website runs through Feedpress and, at some point in November, I must have done something to cause it to behave unreliably. It took me a while to track down in part because I have the JSON feed in NetNewsWire, but not the RSS feed. A silly oversight, I admit.

I think it is fixed, but please let me know if I have still made a mess of things. I recommend subscribing to the JSON feed anyhow if that is an option for you.

TikTok Loses U.S. Divest-or-Ban Appeal ⇥ bbc.com

Liv McMahon and Lily Jamali, BBC News:

TikTok’s bid to overturn a law which would see it banned or sold in the US from early 2025 has been rejected.

[…]

TikTok says it will now take its fight to the US Supreme Court, the country’s highest legal authority.

The court’s opinion (PDF) is not particularly long. As this is framed as a question of national security, the court gives substantial deference to the government’s assessment of TikTok’s threat. It also views the legislation passed earlier this year to limit data brokers as a complementary component of this TikTok divest-or-ban law.

I still do not find this argument particularly compelling. There is still too much dependence on classified information and too little public evidence. A generous interpretation of this is the court knows something I do not, and perhaps this is completely justified. But who knows? The paranoia over this app is leaking but the proof is not.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US Presidential Election may also present a lifeline for the app.

Despite unsuccessfully attempting to ban TikTok during his first term in 2020, he said in the run-up to the November elections he would not allow the ban on TikTok to take effect.

I would be shocked if the incoming administration remains committed to overturning this ban, and not just because of its historically flaky reputation. This very decision references the actions of the first Trump presidency, though it owes more to the more tailored policies of the Biden administration.

If the U.S. Supreme Court does not stay this order and TikTok’s U.S. operations are not jettisoned from its global business, the ban will go into effect the day before Trump’s inauguration.

Brazilian Court Overturns App Store Injunction ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Last month, Brazilian competition authorities ruled against Apple, finding in an increasingly familiar pattern that its anti-steering App Store rules are illegal. It imposed a twenty-day deadline for compliance.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

According to a new Valor Econômico report, a Brazilian Federal Court judge has ruled that the decision by Cade, the Brazilian regulator, is “disproportionate and unnecessary.” The judge understood that the measures imposed by the regulator “change, in a sensitive and structural way” Apple’s business operation.

Cade ruled on November 26 that Apple would have 20 days to comply with antitrust legislation, otherwise it would be fined R$250,000 (US$42,000) per day. Apple had previously appealed on the grounds that the changes requested were too complex and would take too long to be made, so the company wouldn’t be able to meet the 20-day deadline.

Twenty days does seem like a tight turnaround. I have obviously no idea what it would take to copy-and-paste the same policies it uses in Japan, Korea, and the United States, but perhaps it would be easier to rip off the bandage and do so worldwide.

The Finder Column Width Bug Is Still There ⇥ eclecticlight.co

Howard Oakley:

Over those 11 years, governments have come and gone, my grandchildren have grown up and one is now at university, we survived Covid, lost QuickTime and 32-bit code, and now use Apple silicon Macs. But one thing has remained unchanged through all of that, the Finder column width bug.

Maybe this is the year this bug will bubble up to the top of an intern’s to-fix list. As a dedicated user of the column view, I would not miss it.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock: browse 2.0x faster

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2× faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.

Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad. and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Siri Invented a Calendar Event and Then Hallucinated a Helpful Suggestion ⇥ c.im

Go figure — just one day after writing about how Apple’s ambiguous descriptions of supposedly clever features has the potential to rob trust, my phone has become haunted.

I saw a suggestion from Siri that I turn on Do Not Disturb until the end of an event in my calendar — a reservation at a restaurant from 8:30 until 10:00 this morning. No such matching event was in Fantastical. It was, however, shown in the Calendar app as a Siri Suggestion.

What I think happened is that I was looking at that restaurant on OpenTable at perhaps 8:00 this morning. I was doing so in my web browser on my Mac, and I was not logged into OpenTable. My Mac and iPhone are both running operating system beta builds with Apple Intelligence enabled. Siri must have interpreted this mere browsing as me making a reservation, and then added it to my calendar without my asking, and then made a suggestion based on that fictional event.

This was not helpful. It was, in fact, perplexing and creepy. I do not know how all of these things were able to work together to produce this result, but I do not like it at all. It is obvious how this would make anyone question whether they can trust Apple Intelligence, A.I. systems generally, Siri, and their personal privacy. Truly bizarre.

Ambiguity and Trust in Apple Intelligence

Spencer Ackerman has been a national security reporter for over twenty years, and was partially responsible for the Guardian’s coverage of NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. He has good reason to be skeptical of privacy claims in general, and his experience updating his iPhone made him worried:

Recently, I installed Apple’s iOS 18.1 update. Shame on me for not realizing sooner that I should be checking app permissions for Siri — which I had thought I disabled as soon as I bought my device — but after installing it, I noticed this update appeared to change Siri’s defaults.

Apple has a history with changing preferences and dark patterns. This is particularly relevant in the case of the iOS 18.1 update because it was the one with Apple Intelligence, which creates new ambiguity between what is happening on-device and what goes to a server farm somewhere.

Allen Pike:

While easy tasks are handled by their on-device models, Apple’s cloud is used for what I’d call moderate-difficulty work: summarizing long emails, generating patches for Photos’ Clean Up feature, or refining prose in response to a prompt in Writing Tools. In my testing, Clean Up works quite well, while the other server-driven features are what you’d expect from a medium-sized model: nothing impressive.

Users shouldn’t need to care whether a task is completed locally or not, so each feature just quietly uses the backend that Apple feels is appropriate. The relative performance of these two systems over time will probably lead to some features being moved from cloud to device, or vice versa.

It would be nice if it truly did not matter — and, for many users, the blurry line between the two is probably fine. Private Cloud Compute seems to be trustworthy. But I fully appreciate Ackerman’s worries. Someone in his position necessarily must understand what is being stored and processed in which context.

However, Ackerman appears to have interpreted this setting change incorrectly:

I was alarmed to see that even my secure communications apps, like Proton and Signal, were toggled by default to “Learn from this App” and enable some subsidiary functions. I had to swipe them all off.

This setting was, to Ackerman, evidence of Apple “uploading your data to its new cloud-based AI project”, which is a reasonable assumption at a glance. Apple, like every technology company in the past two years, has decided to loudly market everything as being connected to its broader A.I. strategy. In launching these features in a piecemeal manner, though, it is not clear to a layperson which parts of iOS are related to Apple Intelligence, let alone where those interactions are taking place.

However, this particular setting is nearly three years old and unrelated to Apple Intelligence. This is related to Siri Suggestions which appear throughout the system. For example, the widget stack on my home screen suggests my alarm clock app when I charge my iPhone at night. It suggests I open the Microsoft Authenticator app on weekday mornings. When I do not answer the phone for what is clearly a scammer, it suggests I return the missed call. It is not all going to be gold.

Even at the time of its launch, its wording had the potential for confusion — something Apple has not clarified within the Settings app in the intervening years — and it seems to have been enabled by default. While this data may play a role in establishing the “personal context” Apple talks about — both are part of the App Intents framework — I do not believe it is used to train off-device Apple Intelligence models. However, Apple says this data may leave the device:

Your personal information — which is encrypted and remains private — stays up to date across all your devices where you’re signed in to the same Apple Account. As Siri learns about you on one device, your experience with Siri is improved on your other devices. If you don’t want Siri personalization to update across your devices, you can disable Siri in iCloud settings. See Keep what Siri knows about you up to date on your Apple devices.

While I believe Ackerman is incorrect about the setting’s function and how Apple handles its data, I can see how he interpreted it that way. The company is aggressively marketing Apple Intelligence, even though it is entirely unclear which parts of it are available, how it is integrated throughout the company’s operating systems, and which parts are dependent on off-site processing. There are people who really care about these details, and they should be able to get answers to these questions.

All of this stuff may seem wonderful and novel to Apple and, likely, many millions of users. But there are others who have reasonable concerns. Like any new technology, there are questions which can only be answered by those who created it. Only Apple is able to clear up the uncertainty around Apple Intelligence, and I believe it should. A cynical explanation is that this ambiguity is all deliberate because Apple’s A.I. approach is so much slower than its competitors and, so, it is disincentivized from setting clear boundaries. That is possible, but there is plenty of trust to be gained by being upfront now. Americans polled by Pew Research and Gallup have concerns about these technologies. Apple has repeatedly emphasized its privacy bonafides. But these features remain mysterious and suspicious for many people regardless of how much a giant corporation swears it delivers “stateless computation, enforceable guarantees, no privileged access, non-targetability, and verifiable transparency”.

All of that is nice, I am sure. Perhaps someone at Apple can start the trust-building by clarifying what the Siri switch does in the Settings app, though.

Billionaire Bozos or Begrovellers ⇥ nytimes.com

Cade Metz, New York Times:

Mr. [Sam] Altman said he was “tremendously sad” about the rising tensions between the two one-time collaborators.

“I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero,” he said.

But he rejected suggestions that Mr. Musk could use his increasingly close relationship with President-elect Trump to harm OpenAI.

“I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses,” he said.

Alex Heath, the Verge:

Jeff Bezos and President-elect Donald Trump famously didn’t get along the last time Trump was in the White House. This time, Bezos says he’s “very optimistic” and even wants to help out.

“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”

Emily Swanson, the Guardian:

“Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of and a participant in this change that we’re seeing all around America,” Stephen Miller, a top Trump deputy, told Fox.

Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, agreed with Miller. Clegg said in a recent press call that Zuckerberg wanted to play an “active role” in the administration’s tech policy decisions and wanted to participate in “the debate that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere,” particularly on artificial intelligence. Meta declined to provide further comment.

There are two possibilities. The first is that these CEOs are all dummies with memory no more capacious than that of an earthworm. The second is that these people all recognize the transactional and mercurial nature of the incoming administration, and they have begun their ritualistic grovelling. Even though I do not think money and success is evidence of genius, I do not think these CEOs are so dumb they actually believe in the moral fortitude of these goons.

A Lot of People Apparently Watch Podcasts on YouTube Now ⇥ nymag.com

Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal:

Only four years ago, when it was less popular for podcasts than both Spotify and Apple, YouTube becoming a podcasting colossus sounded about as realistic as Martin Scorsese releasing his next movie on TikTok.

But this year, YouTube passed the competition and became the most popular service for podcasts in the U.S., with 31% of weekly podcast listeners saying it’s now the platform they use the most, according to Edison Research.

This is notable, but Cohen omits key context for why YouTube is suddenly a key podcast platform: Google Podcasts was shut down this year with users and podcasters alike instructed to move to YouTube. According to Buzzsprout’s 2023 analytics, Google Podcasts was used by only 2.5% of global listeners. YouTube is not listed in their report, perhaps because it exists in its own bubble instead of being part of the broader RSS-feed-reading podcast client ecosystem.

But where Google was previously bifurcating its market share, it aligned its users behind a single client. And, it would seem, that audience responded favourably.

John Herrman, New York magazine:

Then, just as the 2010s podcasting bubble was about to peak, TikTok arrived. Here was a video-first platform that was basically only a recommendation engine, minus the pretense and/or burden of sociality — a machine for automating and allocating virality. Its rapid growth drove older, less vibrant social-media platforms wild with envy and/or panic. They all immediately copied it, refashioning themselves as algorithmic short-video apps almost overnight. Suddenly, on every social-media platform — including YouTube, which plugged vertical video “Shorts” into its interface and rewarded creators who published them with followers, attention, and money — there was a major new opportunity for rapid, viral growth. TikTok’s success (and imitation by existing megaplatforms) triggered a formal explosion in video content as millions of users figured out what sorts of short videos worked in this new context: Vine-like comedy sketches; dances; product recommendations; rapid-fire confessionals. The list expanded quickly and widely, but one surprising category broke through: podcast clips.

Of the top twenty podcasts according to Edison Research, fifteen have what I would deem meaningful and regular video components. I excluded those with either a still piece of artwork or illustrated talking heads, and those which only occasionally have video.

Dave Winer:

[…] We’re losing the word “podcast” very quickly. It’s coming to mean video interviews on YouTube mostly. Our only hope is upgrading the open platform in a way that stimulates the imagination of creators, and there’s no time to waste. If you make a podcast client, it’s time to start collaborating with competitors and people who create RSS-based podcasts to take advantage of the open platforms, otherwise having a podcast will mean getting approved by Google, Apple, Spotify, Amazon etc. […]

I hope this is not the case. Luckily, YouTube seems to be an additional place for podcasters so far. I found every show in the top twenty available for download through Overcast in an audio-only format. Also, YouTube channels have RSS feeds, though that is not very useful in an audio-only client like Overcast. Also, Google’s commitment to RSS is about as good as the company’s commitment to anything.

U.S. Regulators Propose Reigning in Data Brokers ⇥ consumerfinance.gov

Out of the U.S. today comes a slew of new proposed restrictions against data brokers and their creepy practices.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

[…] The proposed rule would limit the sale of personal identifiers like Social Security Numbers and phone numbers collected by certain companies and make sure that people’s financial data such as income is only shared for legitimate purposes, like facilitating a mortgage approval, and not sold to scammers targeting those in financial distress. The proposal would make clear that when data brokers sell certain sensitive consumer information they are “consumer reporting agencies” under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), requiring them to comply with accuracy requirements, provide consumers access to their information, and maintain safeguards against misuse.

The Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission will prohibit data broker Mobilewalla, Inc. from selling sensitive location data, including data that reveals the identity of an individual’s private home, to settle allegations the data broker sold such information without taking reasonable steps to verify consumers’ consent.

And also the Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Gravy Analytics Inc. and its subsidiary Venntel Inc. for unlawfully tracking and selling sensitive location data from users, including selling data about consumers’ visits to health-related locations and places of worship.

Both of the proposed FTC orders require these businesses to “maintain a sensitive location data program designed to develop a list of sensitive locations and prevent the use, sale, license, transfer, sharing, or disclosure of consumers’ visits to those locations”. These include, for example and in addition to those in the above quotes, shelters, labour union offices, correctional facilities, and military installations. This order was previewed last month in Wired.

As usual, I am conflicted about these policies. While they are yet another example of Lina Khan’s FTC and other government bureaucrats cracking down on individually threatening data brokers, it would be far better for everyone if this were not handled on a case-by-case basis. These brokers have already caused a wealth of damage around the world, and only they are being required to stop. Other players in the rest of the data broker industry will either self-govern or hope they do not fall into the FTC’s crosshairs, and if you believe the former is more likely, you have far greater faith in already-shady businesses than I do.

There is another wrench in these proposals: we are less than two months away from a second Trump presidency, and the forecast for the CFPB looks unfriendly. It was kneecapped during the first administration and it is on the chopping block for those overseeing a advisory committee masquerading as a government agency. The future of the FTC is more murky, with some indicators it will continue its current path — albeit from a Republican-skewed perspective — while others suggest a reversal.

The centring of the U.S. in the digital activity of a vast majority of us gives it unique power on privacy — power it has, so far, used in only very small doses. The future of regulatory agencies like these has relevance to all of us.

Enrons of 2024 ⇥ enroncorp.com

Enron is not really back. Someone managed to grab the Enron.com URL and put up an inspirational faux corporate video and a Shopify merch store. It is all very funny.

What is more amusing to me is stumbling across a preserved-in-amber Enron website. There is an earnings press release from July 2001, mere months before the whole thing went to hell in public. There are descriptions of the company’s vast products.

But this, too, is unofficial. It was created by Facundo Pignanelli to preserve this noteworthy chapter in corporate fraud. There is even an Instagram account. This is all very strange.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock - best in class YouTube ad blocking

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads, and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:

  • video ads

  • pop up banner ads

  • search ads

  • plus many more

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Delicious Wabi-Sabi

Brendan Nystedt, reporting for Wired on a new generation of admirers of crappy digital cameras from the early 2000s:

For those seeking to experiment with their photography, there’s an appeal to using a cheap, old digital model they can shoot with until it stops working. The results are often imperfect, but since the camera is digital, a photographer can mess around and get instant gratification. And for everyone in the vintage digital movement, the fact that the images from these old digicams are worse than those from a smartphone is a feature, not a bug.

Om Malik attributes it to wabi-sabi:

Retromania? Not really. It feels more like a backlash against the excessive perfection of modern cameras, algorithms, and homogenized modern image-making. I don’t disagree — you don’t have to do much to come up with a great-looking photo these days. It seems we all want to rebel against the artistic choices of algorithms and machines — whether it is photos or Spotify’s algorithmic playlists versus manually crafted mixtapes.

I agree, though I do not see why we need to find just one cause — an artistic decision, a retro quality, an aesthetic trend, a rejection of perfection — when it could be driven by any number of these factors. Nailing down exactly which of these is the most important factor is not of particular interest to me; certainly, not nearly as much as understanding that people, as a general rule, value feeling.

I have written about this before and it is something I wish to emphasize repeatedly: efficiency and clarity are necessary elements, but are not the goal. There needs to be space for how things feel. I wrote this as it relates to cooking and cars and onscreen buttons, and it is still something worth pursuing each and every time we create anything.

I thought about this with these two articles, but first last week when Wil Shipley announced the end of Delicious Library:

Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).

I wasn’t contacted about this.

I’ve pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app.

Delicious Library was many things: physical and digital asset management software, a kind of personal library, and a wish list. But it was also — improbably — fun. Little about cataloguing your CDs and books sounds like it ought to be enjoyable, but Shipley and Mike Matas made it feel like something you wanted to do. You wanted to scan items with your Mac’s webcam just because it felt neat. You wanted to see all your media on a digital wooden shelf, if for no other reason than it made those items feel as real onscreen as they are in your hands.

Delicious Library became known as the progenitor of the “delicious generation” of applications, which prioritized visual appeal as much as utility. It was not enough for an app to be functional; it needed to look and feel special. The Human Interface Guidelines were just that: guidelines. One quality of this era was the apparently fastidious approach to every pixel. Another quality is that these applications often had limited features, but were so much fun to use that it was possible to overlook their restrictions.

I do not need to relitigate the subsequent years of visual interfaces going too far, then being reeled in, and then settling in an odd middle ground where I am now staring at an application window with monochrome line-based toolbar icons, deadpan typography, and glassy textures, throwing a heavy drop shadow. None of the specifics matter much. All I care about is how these things feel to look at and to use, something which can be achieved regardless of how attached you are to complex illustrations or simple line work. Like many people, I spend hours a day staring at pixels. Which parts of that are making my heart as happy as my brain? Which mundane tasks are made joyful?

This is not solely a question of software; it has relevance in our physical environment, too, especially as seemingly every little thing in our world is becoming a computer. But it can start with pixels on a screen. We can draw anything on them; why not draw something with feeling? I am not sure we achieve that through strict adherence to perfection in design systems and structures.

I am reluctant to place too much trust in my incomplete understanding of a foreign-to-me concept rooted in another country’s very particular culture, but perhaps the sabi is speaking loudest to me. Our digital interfaces never achieve a patina; in fact, the opposite is more often true: updates seem to erase the passage of time. It is all perpetually new. Is it any wonder so many of us ache for things which seem to freeze the passage of time in a slightly hazier form?

I am not sure how anyone would go about making software feel broken-in, like a well-worn pair of jeans or a lounge chair. Perhaps that is an unattainable goal for something on a screen; perhaps we never really get comfortable with even our most favourite applications. I hope not. It would be a shame if we lose that quality as software eats our world.

Google’s iOS App Inserts Its Own Links Into Webpages ⇥ seroundtable.com

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

Google launched a new feature in the Google App for iOS named Page Annotation. When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can “extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line.” When you click on them, Google takes you to more search results.

This was announced nearly two weeks ago in a subtle forum post. If there was a press release, I cannot find it. It was only picked up by the press thanks to Schwartz’s November 21 article, but those stories were not published until just before the U.S. Thanksgiving long weekend, so this news was basically buried.

Google is now injecting “Page Annotations”, which are kind of like Skimlinks but with search results. The results from a tapped Page Annotation are loaded in a floating temporary sheet, so it is not like users are fully whisked away — but that is almost worse. In the illustration from Google, a person is apparently viewing a list of Japanese castles, into which Google has inserted a link on “Osaka Castle”. Tapping on an injected link will show Google’s standard search results, which are front-loaded with details about how to contact the castle, buy tickets, and see a map. All of those things would be done better in a view that cannot be accidentally swiped away.

Maybe, you are thinking, it would be helpful to easily trigger a search from some selected text, and that is fair. But the Google app already displays a toolbar with a search button when you highlight any text in this app.

Owners of web properties are only able to opt out by completing a Google Form, but you must be signed into the same Google account you use for Search Console. Also, if a property is accessible at multiple URLs — for example, http and https, or www and non-prefixed — you must include each variation separately.

For Google to believe it has the right to inject itself into third-party websites is pure arrogance, yet it is nothing new for the company. It has long approached the web as its own platform over which it has control and ownership. It overlays dialogs without permission; it invented a proprietary fork of HTML and it pushed its adoption for years. It can only do these things because it has control over how people use the web.

Bluesky Changes How Replies Are Sorted by Default ⇥ bsky.app

From the official Bluesky account:

With this release, you can now display replies by “hotness,” which weights liked replies that are more recent more heavily.

I believe this replaced the past reply sorting of oldest to newest. People seem worried this can be gamed, but there is good news: you can just change it. There are options for oldest replies, newest replies, most-liked, and one that is completely randomized. Also, you can still set it to prioritize people you follow.

Imagine that: options for viewing social media that give control back to users. Threads is experimenting, but Meta still fundamentally distrusts users to make decisions like these.

Margrethe Vestager Is the Dam Breaker ⇥ nytimes.com

Adam Satarino, New York Times:

But as Ms. [Margrethe] Vestager closes out her era in Brussels, regulating the tech industry has become more mainstream around the world. Thanks to her, Europe is now widely seen as the pioneer of the toughest laws against tech. U.S. regulators have in recent years followed Europe by bringing antitrust lawsuits against Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon. Regulators in South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere are also taking on the tech giants.

Vestager’s term has been defined by patience. Owing to both the rapid growth in size and complexity of technology firms, and tedious legal processes, these cases have taken considerable time. Some of the earliest cases Vestager brought have just been settled. It is still too early to tell whether the many changes resulting from these cases will have a radical effect on the technology landscape.

However, as Satarino writes, her approach has been influential worldwide. The technology in seemingly every country outside authoritarian states like China and Russia has been under the thumb of big companies most often based in the United States. Sometimes, those products and services clash with local expectations and values, or consume business viability. Not all of these corporations got where they are by illegitimate means, or are unanimously behaving in illegally anticompetitive ways. But it is sensible to investigate and become a correcting force.

For too long, regulators were too hesitant to question tech companies. These businesses were perpetually too new and too complicated. Vestager broke the dam.

Competition Bureau Sues Google for Anti-Competitive Conduct ⇥ canada.ca

Competition Bureau Canada:

The Competition Bureau is taking legal action against Google for anti-competitive conduct in online advertising technology services in Canada. Following a thorough investigation, the Bureau has filed an application with the Competition Tribunal that seeks to remedy the conduct for the benefit of Canadians.

This has become a familiar announcement: a consumer protection agency, somewhere in the world, is questioning whether a giant technology conglomerate has abused its power. A dam has burst.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Launches Broad Microsoft Investigation ⇥ bloomberg.com

Leah Nylen, Josh Sisco, and Dina Bass, Bloomberg:

The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an antitrust investigation of Microsoft Corp., drilling into everything from the company’s cloud computing and software licensing businesses to cybersecurity offerings and artificial intelligence products.

Seems like a lot of people who thought Microsoft would escape antitrust investigations in the U.S. might have been a little too eager.

This kind of scrutiny is a good thing, and long overdue. Yet one of the unavoidable problems of reducing the influence of these giant corporations now is the pain it is going to cause — almost by definition. If a corporation is abusing its power and scale to such a degree the FTC initiates an investigation, unwinding that will have — to put it mildly — an effect. We are seeing this in the Google case. This is true for any situation where a business or a group of people with too much influence needs correcting. That does not mean it should not happen.

It is true that Microsoft’s products and services are the backbone of businesses and governments the world over. These are delivered through tight integrations, all of which encourages further fealty to this singular solution. For example, it used its dominant position with Office 365 to distribute Teams for free, thereby making it even harder for other businesses to compete. It then leveraged Outlook and Teams to boost its web browser, after doing the same with Windows. If it charged for Teams out of the gate, this would be having a different discussion.

Obviously, the FTC’s concerns with Microsoft’s business practices stretch well beyond bundling Teams. According to this Bloomberg report, the Commission is interested in cloud and identity tying, too. On the one hand, it is enormously useful to businesses to have a suite of products with a single point of management and shared credentials. On the other hand, it is a monolithic system that is a non-starter for potential competitors.

The government is understandably worried about the security and stability risks of global dependence on Microsoft, too, but this is odd:

The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices operating on Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.

This might just be Bloomberg’s contextualizing more than it is relevant to the government’s position. But, still, it seems wrong to me to isolate Windows as the problem instead of Crowdstrike itself, especially with better examples to be found in the SolarWinds breach and its track record with first-party security.

‘Surveilled’ Documents Ronan Farrow’s Reporting on Spyware ⇥ newyorker.com

Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker:

Decisions by the White House and by Republican lawmakers about spyware will have implications across a variety of policy areas that Trump and his associates are upending and that reach far beyond Washington. In recent years, an array of states, including Texas, Florida, and California have reportedly purchased spyware and other surveillance technologies; legislators and regulators will dictate whether that trend continues. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, at least two states have already used private personal data to prosecute people for getting abortions. That practice could expand with more widespread and affordable access to this technology.

This article appears to have been timed to coincide with the release of a new documentary on HBO, showing Farrow reporting out stories on NSO Group and other commercial spyware makers. It is not the most substantive piece and I think that plus the headline — “The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone” — is more distracting than it is illuminating. U.S. administrations have, since George W. Bush, used terrorism as a means of hand-waving away civil liberties protections, including domestic spying. Barack Obama’s administration famously killed U.S. citizens without trial, an action which remains shocking to me to this day regardless of who carried it out. In his first administration, Donald Trump compromised the legitimacy of all manner of domestic and foreign politics.

So, to the question of whether the U.S. would begin using fancy spyware on citizens’ phones under any administration, the answer seems more like a question of when and not if. It is just one more tool of a long series of violations. The next Trump administration seems unlikely to be more restrained than the first but, when this happens, I bet it becomes part of the churn-and-burn media cycle. It will barely register except to those who already find this sort of stuff disturbing.

By the way, the documentary itself is fine. It is only about an hour long and is mostly a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting. I am not sure that there is anything new-for-2024 within. Farrow’s New Yorker articles about the subject are far more illuminating.

Mozilla Is Worried About the Proposed Fixes for Google’s Search Monopoly ⇥ pcmag.com

Michael Kan, PC Magazine:

Mozilla points to a key but less eye-catching proposal from the DOJ to regulate Google’s search business, which a judge ruled as a monopoly in August. In their recommendations, federal prosecutors urged the court to ban Google from offering “something of value” to third-party companies to make Google the default search engine over their software or devices. 

“The proposed remedies are designed to end Google’s unlawful practices and open up the market for rivals and new entrants to emerge,” the DOJ told the court. The problem is that Mozilla earns most of its revenue from royalty deals — nearly 86% in 2022 — making Google the default Firefox browser search engine.

This is probably another reason why U.S. prosecutors want to jettison Chrome from Google: they want to reduce any benefit it may accrue from trying to fix its illegal search monopoly. But it seems Google’s position in the industry is so entrenched that correcting it will hurt lots of other businesses, too. That does not mean it should not be broken up or that the DOJ’s proposed remedies are wrong, however.

Google’s Speculation on Apple’s Advertising Ambitions ⇥ businessinsider.com

Peter Kafka, Business Insider:

Titled “Operation Black Walnut,” the 2022 report appears to have been assembled by Google strategists to try to imagine what kind of ad business Apple might eventually build out one day.

Apple’s current ad business is mostly confined to selling ads on its App Store search results page. But the report’s authors speculate that Apple could eventually start selling ads that run on other people’s apps and eventually on the web via its Safari browser. It might eventually become a $30 billion business, they guesstimate.

The iPhone continues to be Apple’s big moneymaker but, right after it is a big bucket labelled “Services”. Some of that is thanks to monthly recurring charges for iCloud, media streaming, video games, news, and fitness stuff. That is what probably comes to mind when you head “Apple Services”. But there are a few more things in that bucket: AppleCare, payments, advertising, and the App Store. Those last two categories are looking less solid than they once did.

Included in “advertising” is the revenue sharing agreement between Apple and Google, which is probably going to take a $20 billion per year haircut. That is about 20% of Apple’s entire annual “Services” revenue, and 16% of its total profits for 2024. Also, regulators are chipping away at the company’s lock on its cut of in-app payments.

The Google document is speculative and external to Apple, so it does not represent Apple’s actual strategy. This is what Google, an advertising company, thinks Apple could do if it wanted to really commit to selling ads. Does losing its Google revenue share tip Apple’s hand? I sure hope not, but I am not the person trying to figure out whether to take a massive financial hit for users’ trust and enjoyment. If Apple has good taste, I hope it will make the right call.

Brazil Antitrust Body Rules Apple Must Permit External Payment Methods in iOS Apps ⇥ reuters.com

Andre Romani and Alberto Alerigi Jr., Reuters:

Brazilian antitrust regulator Cade said on Monday that Apple must lift restrictions on payment methods for in-app purchases, among other things, as the watchdog moved to proceed with an investigation into a complaint filed by Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibre.

It would look very silly to me if Apple continues to deal with these consistent findings in country after country after country after country in individualized ways instead of updating its rules globally. Very silly, indeed.

How Sports Betting Has Changed the U.S. ⇥ rollingstone.com

David Hill, Rolling Stone:

PASPA, which stands for the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, was a law in the U.S. that prohibited sports betting, except in a few states, like Nevada. It was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018, and ever since, sports gambling has exploded into the American zeitgeist. Ads for sportsbooks have dominated televised events, made their way into the stadiums and arenas of professional and collegiate sports alike, and even onto the jerseys of the athletes themselves. Talk of point spreads and totals, once taboo over the airwaves, are now not only common topics among the sports commentariat, but also displayed in the chyron scoreboards right on the screen. It seems like everyone who isn’t betting on sports likely has someone in their life who is. Revenues for sports-betting companies reached nearly $11 billion in 2023, up 44.5 percent from the year before.

[…]

According to NCPG, 16 percent of sports bettors meet the criteria for clinical gambling disorder. Men between the ages of 18 and 24 are particularly at risk, creating what [NCPG executive director Keith] Whyte calls a “ticking time bomb” of young people growing up not knowing what it’s like to not have a sportsbook in their pocket at all times.

Drew Gooden made a video about the same subject and, last year, the Fifth Estate investigated sports betting in Canada after it was legalized here in 2021.

It is strange to me how the world of sports gambling is now just an open business like any other. It makes sense to me that it is legal, but to integrate it so tightly with every aspect of a competition is something I admit to being confused about and a little troubled by. I do not mean to be squeamish about adults having a little fun. But it seems to now be just part of how sports are discussed: not about athletics or strategy, but about all the money you could make. Or, probably, lose.

If one downloads Apple’s Sports app, for example, betting odds are displayed near the top of the screen for every game, just below the current score. This is on by default; it is up to users to turn it off. While a user cannot make a bet from within the app, it seems to treat this vice with uncharacteristic casualness.

Chrome and Competition

Michael Liedtke, Associated Press:

The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.

[…]

Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.

Casey Newton:

In addition to requiring that Chrome be divested, the proposal calls for several other major changes that would be enforced over a 10-year period. They include:

  • Blocking Google from making deals like the one it has with Apple to be its default search engine.

  • Requiring it to let device manufacturers show users a “choice screen” with multiple search engine options on it.

  • Licensing data about search queries, results, and what users click on to rivals.

  • Blocking Google from buying or investing in advertising or search companies, including makers of AI chatbots. (Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic last year.)

The full proposal (PDF) is a pretty easy read. One of the weirder ideas pitched by the Colorado side is to have Google “fund a nationwide advertising and education program” which may, among other things, “include reasonable, short-term incentive payments to users” who pick a non-Google search engine from the choice screen.

I am guessing that is not going to happen, and not just because “Plaintiff United States and its Co-Plaintiff States do not join in proposing these remedies”. In fact, much of this wish list seems unlikely to be part of the final judgement expected next summer — in part because it is extensive, in part because of politics, and also because it seems unrelated.

Deborah Mary Sophia, Akash Sriram, and Kenrick Cai, Reuters:

“DOJ will face substantial headwinds with this remedy,” because Chrome can run search engines other than Google, said Gus Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “Courts expect any remedy to have a causal connection to the underlying antitrust concern. Divesting Chrome does absolutely nothing to address this concern.”

I — an effectively random Canadian with no expertise in this and, so, you should take my perspective with appropriate caveats — disagree.

The objective of disentangling Chrome from Google’s ownership, according to the executive summary (PDF) produced by the Department of Justice, is to remove “a significant challenge to effectuate a remedy that aims to ‘unfetter [these] market[s] from anticompetitive conduct'”:

A successful remedy requires that Google: stop third-party payments that exclude rivals by advantaging Google and discouraging procompetitive partnerships that would offer entrants access to efficient and effective distribution; disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field it has illegally slanted, including, at the outset, licensing syndicated search results that provide potential competitors a chance to offer greater innovation and more effective competition; and reduce Google’s ability to control incentives across the broader ecosystem via ownership and control of products and data complementary to search.

The DOJ’s theory of growth reinforcing quality and market dominance is sound, from what I understand, and Google does advantage Chrome in some key ways. Most directly related to this case is whether Chrome activity is connected to Google Search. Despite company executives explicitly denying using Chrome browsing data for ranking, a leak earlier this year confirmed Google does, indeed, consider Chrome views in its rankings.

There is also a setting labelled “Make searches and browsing better”, which automatically “sends URLs of the pages you visit” to Google for users of Chromium-based browsers. Google says this allows the company to “predict what sites you might visit next and to show you additional info about the page you’re visiting” which allows users to “browse faster because content is proactively loaded”.

There is a good question as to how much Google Search would be impacted if Google could not own Chrome or operate its own browser for five years, as the remedy proposes. How much weight these features have in Google’s ranking system is something only Google knows. And the DOJ does not propose that Google Search cannot be preloaded in browsers whatsoever. Many users would probably still select Google as their browser’s search engine, too. But Google Search does benefit from Google’s ownership of Chrome itself, so perhaps it is worth putting barriers between the two.

I do not think Chrome can exist as a standalone company. I also do not think it makes sense for another company to own it, since any of those big enough to do so either have their own browsers — Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge — or would have the potential to create new anticompetitive problems, like if it were acquired by Meta.

What if the solution looks more like prohibiting Google from uniquely leveraging Chrome to benefit its other products? I do not know how that could be written in legal terms, but it appears to me this is one of the DOJ’s goals for separating Chrome and Google.

‘Opinion: Bluesky Is a Dangerous Echo Chamber Because No One Wants to Hear From Me, Specifically’ ⇥ thebeaverton.com

Sam Adams, on Bluesky [sic]:

funny how all the “Bluesky is an echo chamber” opeds sound exactly the same

Mary Gillis, the Beaverton:

So imagine my surprise when instead of welcoming me with open arms and the thousands of new followers I was expecting, Bluesky shunned me.

Why? Because I have some opinions they disagree with. And instead of respecting my inalienable right to be debated, they just… blocked me. Like I’m some kind of annoyance, rather than the iconoclastic and fascinating truth-teller which I know myself to be.

Quality satire.

Every arena of discussion has boundaries for what is acceptable. But only some viewpoints are considered part of an “echo chamber”, and the people who espouse them ought to be subjected, I guess, to abuse and intolerance. I wonder why that is.

Sill Collates Top Links From Your Accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon ⇥ sill.social

Sill allows you to connect your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts — one of each — and see what links are popular among the accounts you follow. As Andy Baio says, it is “like Nuzzel was for Twitter”.

Tyler Fisher:

As decentralized social media continues to grow, I believe it is important to build a strong ecosystem of third party tools that support these networks and embellish their functionality. Sill adds an important piece of that puzzle, a way to get the biggest stories from your networks without remaining glued to your feeds. Above all, Sill promotes a healthier way to use social media.

I have been using Sill for about a week. If it feels familiar, that could be because I posted about it last week before Fisher was ready for broader adoption. I took down my link, but I kept using it because it is fantastic. If you want a high-level overview of what people are linking to, you should check out Sill.

App Store Search Queries Appear to Violate Data Minimization Practices ⇥ mastodon.social

Mysk:

This is an example of what the App Store app shares with Apple when you search for an app. Everything you type in the search field is recorded as an event and associated with your Apple ID before it is sent to Apple. […]

Data is sent to Apple in near real-time (the difference between the Event Time and the Post Time).

I can understand why Apple would want to correlate typed text with autocompletion or suggestions. I can also see why Apple would want to attach completed search queries to an Apple ID. I disagree with both of these things, but I can understand wanting to know whether helpful recommendations are appearing soon enough, and making results more relevant to a user. In theory.

What I cannot understand is why Apple wants to record all typed text and completed queries and correlate those to millisecond-level time codes and attach all that to someone’s Apple ID. This is the very opposite of data minimization — a reality which is unfortunately common among Apple’s services. It is not “tracking” by the company’s definition, which is exclusively concerning third-party sharing, but it violates the spirit of user privacy.

Adam Mosseri Says Threads Will Now Show You More of the Stuff You Have Said You Are Interested in Seeing ⇥ threads.net

Adam Mosseri in a Threads post:

We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today. For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. This is definitely a work in progress – balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky – thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming.

I read this as more of an apologetic concession than an actual strategy change, and that struck me as odd. Would the Threads team not be glad to deliver to users what they have elected to see, instead of doing a whole bunch of math to badly guess at stuff they might be interested in? The language here is weird, too; Mosseri immediately focuses on the metrics.

However, I think this accurately represents how Threads is viewed. Look at the replies to Mosseri’s post and — while I do not want to imply there is a consistent theme — there are lots of people who are leaning on recommendations with the objective of growing their following and reach, and they are worried. These are the people who see social media as a place for furthering their brand. They are not interesting. The only way they are able to grow their audience is by treating a recommendations algorithm as a problem to be solved.

Mosseri did not say suggested posts would be eliminated from the For You feed, only that the balance would shift. From my experience with it today, it really seems to be better. About half the posts are from accounts I follow, and the rest are proximate to things I care about. It feels completely different from the Threads of a week ago. It is actually — dare I say it? — not bad. At least, that is the case right now. I bet Threads next month will feel entirely changed again.

The Decaf Project ⇥ youtube.com

Here is something I am very excited about: James Hoffmann has finally figured out a way to do what he has been calling — for years — the “decaf project”. The goal is to taste the same batch of coffee decaffeinated in three different processes, and alongside the caffeinated batch.

I am looking forward to this. I ordered my tasting kit from Rosso right here in Calgary; kits are available from dozens of roasters worldwide. If you really like coffee, you might consider ordering one for yourself, too.

Release the X Files ⇥ msnbc.com

Mike Masnick, for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and … crickets. The silence is deafening.

One might point to Masnick’s seat on Bluesky’s board of directors as evidence of some kind of conflict of interest; indeed, that is the only complaint I have seen from anyone named in this article or associated with the “Twitter Files”. Sure, it would have been a good idea to disclose that in Masnick’s author bio or somewhere in the piece. But that is not a substantial explanation for the different response to two White House-connected social media platforms after the manufactured alarmism over internal Twitter moderation deliberations.

It is possible these writers — Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss — might eventually post some token objection to Musk’s governance of X and his close government ties. Trump’s Truth Social might even worry them. But there will be no response similar to the Twitter Files: no Congressional hearings at which one of the writers declares (PDF) this a “grave threat”; no wall-to-wall media coverage; and no awkward pretensions about the gravity of this relationship. Instead, these same writers will — as they did during the last Trump presidency — likely mock anyone fretting about this very real close coordination happening right before our very eyes.

‘The App Store Era Must End’ ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

A few years later, Apple began planning how to bring the Mac into the App Store universe. However, macOS was designed in a much earlier era and didn’t offer the level of lockdown that Apple built into iOS. Rather than attempting to lock down the Mac and make it more like iOS, the company wisely chose a different path.

Today’s macOS is a reflection of that decision, and it’s undeniably the right one – not just for the Mac but for every computing device we own.

A blistering but entirely fair analysis. If you are a developer or you are familiar with this history, I do not know that there is a new argument here. But to see them in a single document is compelling.

You may also disagree with Snell’s description of the MacOS model as “undeniably the right one” — maybe your preferred software model has zero permission or authorization prompts. I get that; I, too, am not always thrilled with the way third-party software works on MacOS. Alas, many of the permission dialogs are a patch for ineffective or nonexistent privacy regulations, so all we need to do is fix that. How hard can that be?

I worry the App Store model and the regulatory response has irreparably damaged Apple’s entire ethos. Not destroyed, but definitely damaged. Apple prides itself on making the entire widget: hardware, software, and services. No competitor has a similar model. It has gotten away with this through a combination of user trust, and not being nearly big enough for regulators to be concerned about. But the iPhone fundamentally upset both these qualities.

As Snell writes, the App Store gives users confidence in the software they are downloading and it means Apple has staggering control over all the platforms it used to call “post-P.C. devices”. I think that robs users’ trust. I, for one, am excited by the potential of the Vision Pro, but I know it will always be constrained because of the app model it shares with iOS devices.

Also, because the iPhone is so popular, it is understandable why regulators would want to be a democratic check on corporate power. Alas, their remedies could shake up Apple’s whole-widget ethos.

There are certainly plenty of people who believe Apple should be able to do with the iPhone what it wishes, and that — thanks to the power of the free market — people who do not like those changes will simply go buy something else. Perhaps. But perhaps, too, Apple’s influence over a billion users worldwide is something worth checking on. If Apple had responded more amenably to concerns raised over the past decade, maybe it would not find itself in this position today — but here we are.

Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking U.S. Soldiers and Spies ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.

Yet another entry in the ongoing series of stories documenting how we have created a universal unregulated tracking system accessible to basically anyone so that, incidentally, it will make someone slightly more likely to buy a specific brand of cereal. This particular demonstration feels like a reversal of governments using this data to surveil people with less oversight and fewer roadblocks.

The FTC is apparently planning to address this by, according to these reporters, “formally recogniz[ing] US military installations as protected sites”, which is a truly bananas response. The correct answer is for lawmakers to pass a strong privacy framework that restricts data collection and retention, but doing so would be economically costly and would impede the exploitation of this data by the U.S. and its allies. Instead, the world’s most powerful military is going to tell scummy data brokers not to track people within specific areas all over the world.

Reporters and researchers, meanwhile, will continue to point out how this mass data collection makes everyone vulnerable. It feels increasingly like splitting hairs between the surveillance volunteered by U.S. industry, and that which is mandated by more oppressive governments. I recognize there is a difference — the force is the difference — but the effect is comparable.

IMG_0001, IMG_4228 ⇥ walzr.com

Last week, I linked to a very cool project in which Ben Wallace pointed to the seemingly endless depths of barely labelled iPhone video uploads on YouTube. Here are a couple more things along similar lines.

First, Riley Walz built a viewer to shuffle between five million of these videos. There are all manner of music recitals, and people driving exotic cars, and amateur horror shorts, and softball games, and dogs playing — and more. Did not work in Safari for me, but it was fine in a Chromium-based browser; this could just be a me problem. (Via Andy Baio.)

Second, Pete Ashton pointed me to a pair of 2012 projects: one of videos from YouTube, another of photos from Flickr. All share a specific filename in the same format: “IMG_4228”. Each media type is displayed in a unique way. The images are a slideshow. But the videos are all played together in a screen recording; I think that is especially fascinating.

Potential Algorithmic Bias on X During the 2024 U.S. Election ⇥ eprints.qut.edu.au

Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic:

This technical report presents findings from a two-phase analysis investigating potential algorithmic bias in engagement metrics on X (formerly Twitter) by examining Elon Musk’s account against a group of prominent users and subsequently comparing Republican-leaning versus Democrat-leaning accounts. The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics for all accounts under examination. The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024.

While this is presented in academic paper format, you should know that it is still an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed working paper. Its methodology involves just ten X accounts and, as the authors note, their analysis is limited due to the site’s opacity for researchers. Also, the authors do not once mention the assassination attempt that led to Musk’s endorsement on the very same day — a conspicuous absence, I think. None of this means it is inherently inaccurate. It does mean you should hold onto these findings very, very loosely.

It is worth reading, though, because even if I do not entirely trust its findings, it is still compelling (PDF). I am not sure what criteria were used to select the ten accounts in question, but the five Democrat-aligned accounts are all either lawmakers or political leaders in some way. The five Republican-aligned accounts, on the other hand, are all commentators and also Donald Trump Jr., and I am not sure that is a reasonable comparison. Surely it would be better to compare like-to-like.

Even so, it sure appears the date of Musk’s endorsement matches the timing of a change in political activity on X. One possibility is for the assassination attempt and endorsement to have caused more activity on his platform, and specifically among those who do not find its owner to be an odious buffoon. However, a more cynical possibility suggested by this research is of the platform taking sides, despite its new owner promising neutrality. Theoretically, we can check this for ourselves. In the name of “full transparency”, X published “the algorithm” on GitHub; indeed, it appears it was updated around the same time as these researchers found this partisan boost. But there is not a corresponding public commit — no public commits, in fact, since July 2023, as of writing — so it is impossible to know if this is related or just someone fixing a typo. “Transparency” does not work when it depends on unreliable actors.

Also, if the work of these researchers represents a true shift, I believe it will be the first time fears of an explicitly partisan influence on algorithmic recommendations have been demonstrated in the United States. Meta has avoided suggesting posts it deems political in nature — probably because they are more difficult to moderate, and partly because it is beneficial for Meta to ingratiate itself with the incoming administration. TikTok, despite public fears, has no demonstrated partisan political influence.

But X? Its users and ownership have carved out a space for explicit discrimination and — possibly — partisan bias.

A Popular A.I. Training Set Includes Data from OpenSubtitles ⇥ theatlantic.com

Alex Reisner, the Atlantic:

I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. […]

The files within this data set are not scripts, exactly. Rather, they are subtitles taken from a website called OpenSubtitles.org. Users of the site typically extract subtitles from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams using optical-character-recognition (OCR) software. Then they upload the results to OpenSubtitles.org, which now hosts more than 9 million subtitle files in more than 100 languages and dialects. […]

The Atlantic has built a search engine of subtitles used in training. This is in addition to — but in the same data set as — YouTube subtitles.

The files provided by websites like OpenSubtitles are, to my knowledge, not exactly legal. Courts in Australia and the Netherlands have treated them as distinct works protected by copyright. I am not arguing this is correct — fan-created subtitles are useful and can permit more translation options — but it is noteworthy for these models to be trained not only on original works without explicit permission, but also on derivative works made illegally.

Put it this way: would it be right if models used for generating movies were trained on a corpus of pirated movies, or music to be trained on someone’s LimeWire collection? It arguably does not matter whether copyright holders were paid for the single copy used in training materials, since it is a derivative created without permission in either case. But it feels a tiny bit worse to know generative models were trained using illicit subtitles instead of quasi-legitimate ones.

What Is a Skeptic? ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They’re the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions, even about well-founded and understood phenomena — but the asker must be honestly willing to accept answers, not using questions as a sly means of discrediting actual knowledge and expertise.

My one complaint with Burneko’s piece can be found in this sentence a little bit later:

[…] At any rate, “vaccine skeptic” certainly is nicer and less contentious than calling Kennedy a motivated bullshitter, a peddler of antiscientific garbage, the type of dogshit-brained imbecile who will stiff-arm all that can be learned from centuries of medical research and practice because he preferred what he learned from a 25-second TikTok video made by a spiral-eyed homeschool casualty who’ll be hospitalized next month with an illness that hasn’t sickened a human being since the Bronze Age. […]

To be clear, it is not this sentence itself I have a problem with. This is phenomenal. Burneko’s essays are among my favourite things I read in any given year.

No, the problem I have is that this sentence sits in the middle of a paragraph about how the New York Times uses words like “skeptic” to launder and, by extension, validate the unhinged claims of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it dismisses his knowledge as coming from a “25-second TikTok video”. That is not where he is learning these things. What is offensive is that Kennedy’s view of health and disease comes from a mix of a specific ecosystem pushing these claims, and mainstream media outlets like the Times giving them a modicum of credibility.

It is not just Kennedy; a 2011 article in the Times about Andrew Wakefield is front-loaded with descriptions of the “controversial figure” and his “concerns about the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine”. It takes a couple thousand more words to get to Brian Deer’s brutal debunking, but it is only afforded a small chunk of the article, with the author writing “it would take a book to encompass” the back-and-forth between Deer and Wakefield. To a casual reader, this article would feel like a cautious middle-ground approach even though, at the time it was published, Deer had already released the scathing results of his investigation in a series of Sunday Times articles and a documentary. Luckily, a book is now also available.

Voice-from-nowhere journalism may not be solely responsible for the beliefs of people like Kennedy, but it validates those views all the same. Media should be skeptical, in that it ought to continuously ask questions and articulate the answers and the evidence.

Canadian Right-to-Repair Legislation Receives Royal Assent ⇥ theregister.com

Brandon Vigliarolo, the Register:

Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada’s Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of “maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing,” and “to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component.”

Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixIt:

There’s one major limitation that Canada shares with the US: neither country allows for the trafficking of repair tools. While Canadians can now legally bypass TPMs to fix their own devices, they can’t legally sell or share tools designed for that purpose. This means Canadian consumers and repair pros still face technical and legal hurdles to access the necessary repair tools, much like in the US.

This win for Canadians is still huge — it’s the first time federal law anywhere has tackled digital locks in favor of repair. But the restriction on tools limits who can benefit, which is why the repair fight continues.

This legislation has been a long time coming. I thought I had written about C–244 earlier this year, but it turns out it was last November. Still, progress, and with unanimous agreement.

Slop on Spotify ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

[…] But so had a lot of artists with single-word names, such as Swans, Asia, Standards, and Gong. A new album would appear on an artist’s Spotify page, bearing their name but no similarity to their music. Sometimes, as with the fake HEALTH albums, they would disappear after a few days. Other times, they would linger indefinitely, even against the artist’s will.

[…]

It looks like Standards, Annie, HEALTH, Swans, and a number of other notable one-word artists were targeted directly. Spotify confirmed that the onslaught of AI garbage was delivered from one source, the licensor Ameritz Music. Ameritz Music did not respond to a request for comment.

The great ensloppening of the internet continues — except, in the case of Spotify, this is a repeat problem.

The Onion Buys InfoWars ⇥ theonion.com

Ben Collins today promised “the funniest news you’ve ever heard in your entire life” and, boy, did he deliver.

“Bryce P. Tetraeder”, “CEO” of Global Tetrahedron, as published the Onion:

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

The CEO may be fake, but this is real: the Onion bought InfoWars with the assistance of the families of Sandy Hook victims. The relaunched site will be supported by Everytown for Gun Safety. What a perfect, full-circle kind of outcome to dilute the influence of one of the worst figures in media.

Congratulations to Collins on being the proud owner of InfoWars’ assets, legally speaking. Given the hosts’ predilection for heavy drinking and indoor smoking, I bet the studio reeks.

Update: Some no-fun judge might be a real jackass about this whole thing and do the second-least-funny thing this year.

Misguided Apple Intelligence Ads ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

In the first ad, Apple Intelligence enables a goof-off who wastes time and annoys his colleagues to surprise his boss with an unexpectedly well-written email. It’s not clear that the boss is impressed; he just can’t believe the guy would have written a professional message.

[…]

The second ad channels a similar suggestion — that Apple Intelligence is a crutch for the thoughtless. […]

Michael Tsai:

It’s really quite a different message than a bicycle for the mind.

These ads come across either as unimaginative as the people they represent, or as a Freudian slip, depending on your perspective.

The first is a little better than the second because it at least hints at something I bet many of us dread: writing work email. But why not a version which elevates someone who cares? The armchair director in me wants this to be an employee who is clearly trying hard, writing a frustrated email to someone who is not, and needing to adjust the tone of a pretty mean email.

The second ad is beyond helping. If someone had handed me their own phone with a photo slideshow at any point in the past five years, I would have assumed they did not make it themselves. I do not know anybody in real life who has ever done so.

I know there are many A.I. skeptics out there — those who think the whole thing is a bust. But even if that describes you, try setting that aside and put on your best marketing smile: even you can probably imagine a handful of ways to show features like these in ways that do not make people look lazy or forgetful. How about someone struggling to find the words for something, using Writing Tools for inspiration, and then making edits to fit their personality? Or someone searching through their photo library with vague terms for a specific picture — say, a special dinner with a particular dish they want to make again? Or someone finding memories of an apartment they are leaving as they move to another city? I am sure someone on the marketing team pitched ideas like these and they were shot down for one reason or another, but they all feel more palatable to me than what I see here.

Update: I live my life by the adage never read the comments but, in this case, it would have been useful. “Joe Mac User” on TidBits points to two other ads, one of which is pretty similar to my thoughts of how to improve the first of the ads Engst linked to. Maybe that makes me biased, but it is easily the least inappropriate of these four.

Elon Musk-Themed A.I. Slop ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

I have reported on AI-generated spam for a year now, and have watched as different trends come and go. In August, when I wrote about this community of people, bizarre Jesus content, surreal landscapes and dream homes, and birthday celebration posts were performing very well on Facebook. At the time, one Facebook AI spammer told me that they intended to begin spamming Facebook with “American news.” It is clear that pro-Elon Musk inspiration porn is the new strategy, or “meta” for these spammers, and creating AI spam that specifically targets people in the United States is part of the new strategy. The YouTube page for one of the Indian influencers who teaches people how to do this is full of videos for “USA CHANNELS” and US-focused spam. This strategy is clearly trickling down to Facebook at a large scale that is impossible to quantify or systematically study because Meta has killed CrowdTangle, a research tool that showed how content spread on the platform.

It seems to me this would not be nearly so popular if not for two phenomena: the transition of Facebook into a recommendations-focused product, and the idolization of tycoons. Yes, the invention of semi-realistic image generators is a necessary component, but the slop would not be nearly as successful if it did not have those two factors. Facebook is now a mix of the stuff people signed up for — like pictures from their friends, and group discussions with people in their neighbourhood — and suggestions of all kinds of crap Facebook thinks they might want to see. Also, ads, which are functionally similar in that they are things people did not ask for and must endure in order to see the things they care about.

Facebook promotes posts based in part on the activity they generate — comments, likes, and views — which is unsurprising. These things can be indicators of a noteworthy post. But Goodhart’s law suggests signals like these can become targets, therefore making them useless as metrics. Even so, they are used by Facebook to pollute users’ feeds with unrelated posts and juke engagement statistics. I do not think these posts would be nearly as widespread if they were not recommended to users. If people had to seek them out, the odd one would be shared by one of your more gullible friends.

Koebler says these posts are likely being propelled into users’ feeds by other real people, not automated traffic. That also suggests to me some level of CEO-as-celebrity idolization. This does not work for every business magnate — how many viral posts have you seen invoking Thomas Peterffy, or Gina Rinehart, or even Phil Knight? These are all billionaires, but none has a public cult of personality in the same way as does Musk, or Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, or even, to some extent, Warren Buffett. If we correctly recognized the adversarial relationship these tycoons have with the rest of the world, I also think this slop would struggle to gain traction.

Microsoft Thinks the Problem With Its A.I. Stuff Is the Name ⇥ techradar.com

Eric Hal Schwartz, TechRadar:

Microsoft has made Copilot the name and style of its AI assistant and other AI services for more than a year, but it seems the company might have a rebranding project underway with a transparent origin. In references shared on X from the appprivacy.adml file, it looks like AI-powered features in Windows 11 will be collected under the umbrella name “Windows Intelligence.” While positioning AI centrally in the operating system is certainly not a surprise, the name is either a deliberate attempt to leverage Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” branding or the biggest coincidence since Mark Zuckerberg started a company with the same name as Harvard’s digital yearbook.

I do not really care about the similarity to Apple’s branding. Far funnier, to me, is how Microsoft seems incapable of sticking with a name for anything newer than Windows. I think “Copilot” is a nice, friendly name; I think “Windows Intelligence” sounds inherently oxymoronic.

How Amazon Threatens Canada’s Post Office ⇥ disconnect.blog

Paris Marx:

That leaves us with an important question to consider. Not just what we want the future of Canada Post to be, but also what kind of society we want to live in. We should want to take advantage of the post office’s unique, nationwide infrastructure to provide more and better services to Canadians instead of dismantling something that we may never be able to rebuild. But even more than, the government should see Amazon’s low-wage, non-union model as a threat not just to Canada Post, but to Canadian workers across the board, and intervene to rein it in.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers today gave notice of an impending strike after a year of contract negotiations. It would be horrible for our national postal system to be hollowed out by a private — and foreign — corporation with no obligation to service all Canadians.

Old iPhone Videos Hidden in Plain Sight ⇥ ben-mini.github.io

Ben Wallace:

While Send to YouTube can be thoroughly analyzed as a milestone on the “frenemy” timeline between Apple and Google, I want to explore a pleasant consequence of this moment. Apple uses the ‘IMG_XXXX’ naming convention for all images and videos captured on iOS devices, where XXXX is a unique sequence number. The first image you take is named “IMG_0001”, the second is “IMG_0002” and so on. During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.

Like sharing Strava routes, this feels like a throwback to a different time. I found some videos shot on the fifth-generation iPod Nano, too, which used the same naming scheme.

Apple’s ‘Best Albums’ List Available in $450 Coffee Table Book Form ⇥ assouline.com

I am not sure what amuses most about this book, as there is so much to choose from. The $450 price tag, perhaps, for what appears to be the same short essays featured in Apple Music. Maybe it is the lack of anything released before 1959. Perhaps it is in celebrating the hollowness of Apple’s ranking.

For me, though, it is that this book, which features the covers of the hundred best albums of all time, contains — according to this product page — exactly 97 illustrations. Which three album covers are missing, I wonder?

(Via Christina Warren.)

Apple Quietly Introduced iPhone ‘Inactivity Reboot’ ⇥ 404media.co

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.

“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code.

The way this was explained in the original article does not appear to be accurate:

[…] The law enforcement officials’ hypothesis is that “the iPhone devices with iOS 18.0 brought into the lab, if conditions were available, communicated with the other iPhone devices that were powered on in the vault in AFU. That communication sent a signal to devices to reboot after so much time had transpired since device activity or being off network.” They believe this could apply to iOS 18.0 devices that are not just entered as evidence, but also personal devices belonging to forensic examiners.

None of this appears to be true. It only seems as though iPhones reboot automatically after inactivity, making them harder to crack. It seems the cops believed iPhones were secretly communicating with each other because some of them were running older iOS versions, forgetting the explanation that satisfies Hanlon’s razor: iOS is kind of buggy.

It is impossible to differentiate between improving the security of user data on an iPhone that has been stolen, and locking out police as a phone sits in an evidence locker. The former is worth pursing, and sorry about the latter.

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

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.

Magic Lasso Adblock: No ads, no trackers, no annoyances, no worries

By blocking ad trackers, Magic Lasso Adblock stops you being followed by ads around the web.

As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And it’s been designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.

Users rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Remove ad trackers, annoyances and background crypto-mining scripts

  • Browse common websites 2.0× faster

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Wonder Has Raised Over a Billion Dollars to Be a Maker of Generic Food ⇥ grubstreet.com

Matthew Schneier, Grub Street:

What even is Wonder? Founded in 2018, it is, according to its own marketing copy, “a new kind of food hall.” More of a Potemkin food hall, really. Under its green shingle, Wonder comprises some 30 “restaurants,” which are really more like sub-brands. […]

[…] The company partners with chefs or restaurateurs for an up-front fee and equity, and its team of “culinary engineers” works with the chefs for months to develop a scalable, deliverable menu. New ideas are then piloted at a Wonder location — Downtown Brooklyn and Westfield, New Jersey, are both pilot stores — after which the food is rolled out to many more. Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. […]

So it is a bunch of styles of food assembled — not made or cooked — in the same kitchen by the same people. Like on an airplane, famously the best cuisine you are able to get when you are stuck ten kilometres in the sky, and by no other metric.

Rebecca Deczynski, Inc, in March:

Wonder, [Marc] Lore’s New York City-based food delivery startup, which currently has 11 brick-and-mortar locations that serve fast-cooked meals by chefs including Bobby Flay and Michael Symon, has completed a $700-million funding round, the company announced today.

Wonder has raised, according to Deczynski, $1.5 billion. To be clear, neither Flay nor Symon is making your dinner.

I get how this allows a group of people to each get the kind of food they want, all in one order. But we already have restaurants that do that, and they usually suck. If you have ever dined at a place offering sushi, wings, fettuccini Alfredo, and seafood, you already know none of those things will be as good as a cheap and unfussy cuisine-specific neighbourhood joint.

This is an evolution of the ghost kitchen concept. Like those, I can see this sort of thing fragmenting communities as supporting a local restaurant is replaced with this mediocre and inexpensive — for now — venture capital-funded alternative.

The MacBook Pro Nano-Texture Display Is Matte From the Inside ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, of PetaPixel, reviewed the new MacBook Pro:

The only other major change to the design of this laptop is the choice to add Apple’s nano-texture display which significantly reduces glare. The MacBook Pro has been very prone to glare over the years and would have to rely solely on pure brightness to overcome it. Now it has another tool in its arsenal although the implementation is slightly different than nano-texture has been on previous Apple devices like the Pro Display XDR and iPad Pro. While those two devices have a layer of glass which is then etched with the nano-texture, the MacBook Pro doesn’t use that same glass cover. The nano-texture is, therefore, instead embedded on the inside of the display. The effect is the same, or similar enough, and Apple includes its special polishing cloth too, but it’s not strictly “necessary” to use to clean the MacBook Pro display (although it is recommended).

I have not seen it mentioned anywhere else that the texture layer is on the inside of the display. It feels like it would be more appropriate for a portable product as it would be easier to clean. But the iPad Pro is available with a matte display, too, and its texture is on the outside. If an iPhone model becomes available with a nano-texture display option, I would bet its texture is on the inside, like the MacBook Pro.

Also, notable to me is the vast price gap in nano-texture options. Choosing that option on the iPad Pro costs $100 more than the standard glass in U.S. pricing; on the MacBook Pro, it is $150; on the iMac, $200. On the Studio Display, it is $300. And, still — five years later — it remains a $1,000 upgrade on the Pro Display XDR.

The Fight

You might want to skip this one.

From the perspective of this outsider, the results of this year’s U.S. presidential election are stunning. I feel terrible for those within the U.S. who will endure another four years of having longtime institutions ripped apart by a criminal administration and its enablers in the legislative and judicial branches. This is true of just about everybody, but the brunt of the pain inflicted will — again — be directed toward the LGBTQ community, immigrants, visible minorities, and women.

As the world’s sole superpower, however, the effects of U.S. lawmaking will be felt everywhere. The incoming administration’s actions will, at best, disregard consequence. Again: at best. The rest of the world will attempt to govern itself around the whims of an unstable sex abuser, his dangerously feckless cabinet, and a host of grovelling billionaires whispering in his ear.

While the oligarchs and authoritarians of the world will have influence over what happens next in the U.S., us normal people will not. The best we can do is prevent a similar catastrophe befalling our communities. Democracies around the world have elected a raft of far-right ideologues and strongmen — in Austria, Belgium, France, Indonesia, Italy, and the Netherlands. Nationalist ideologies in Europe are now the “establishment”.

Here at home, Canada’s Conservative Party leader is more popular than his rivals and he is itching for an election. Though not our farthest-right party, his policies are of the slash-and-burn variety; his party uniformly voted against those new privacy laws.

Closer still, our provincial government is enacting massive reforms aligned with some of the most conservative U.S. states. At their recent conference, they embraced carbon dioxide as a token principle. Like many conservative governments, they are targeting people who are transgender with restrictive legislation opposed by medical professionals. These policies got the attention of Amnesty International when they were announced.

A predictable response from centrist parties is that they will move rightward to present themselves as a moderating alternative to the more hardline conservatives. I am not a political scientist, but it does not seem that growing the size of the tent will be inviting to a electorate increasingly comfortable with far-right ideas. There are thankfully still places where democracies in recent elections have not embraced a nationalist agenda, and where elections are not between shades of conservatism. Our politicians would do well to learn from them.

We each get to choose our societal role. At the moment, for those of us who do not align with these dominant forces, it can feel pretty small. This is not an airport book; I am not ending this thing on a hopeful note and a list of to-dos. I am scared of what this U.S. election means for decades to come. I am just as worried about policies close to home, and those are the ones I can try to do something about.

I am not giving up. But I am overwhelmed by how far democratic countries around the world have regressed, and how much further they are likely to go.

Canadian Government Bans TikTok’s Canadian Operations, but Not Its App ⇥ cbc.ca

Catharine Tunney, CBC News:

Citing national security concerns, the federal government has ordered TikTok to close its Canadian operations — but users will still be able to access the popular app.

My position is that TikTok should not be banned; instead, governments should focus on comprehensive privacy legislation to protect users from all avenues of data exploitation. So it is kind of a good thing the Canadian government is not prohibiting the app or users’ access — except the government’s position appears to be entirely contradictory. It is very worried about user privacy:

Former CSIS director David Vigneault told CBC News it’s “very clear” from the app’s design that data gleaned from its users “is available to the government of China” and its large-scale data harvesting goals.

But laws drawn up in 2022 which would restrict these practices have been stuck in committee since May. So there is an ostensibly dangerous app posing a risk to Canadians, and the government’s response is to let people keep using it while shutting down the company’s offices? The Standing Committee on Industry and Technology had better get moving.

The Powerful Density of Hypertextual Writing ⇥ kottke.org

Please forgive me for quoting this New York Times editorial board piece in its entirety:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

This is arresting, and not just because of how direct it is. It makes the best of the medium of the web in a way that would simply be impossible in print: by stacking link upon link.

Jason Kottke:

A simple list of headlines would have done the same basic job, but by presenting it this way, the Times editorial board is simultaneously able to deliver a strong opinion; each of those links is like a fist pounding on the desk for emphasis. Lies, threat, corruption, cruel, autocrats — bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! Here! Are! The! Fucking! Receipts!

John Gruber:

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Both these pieces are so good, I just had to point to them and add my own stance: link often, and link generously. Writing on the web is not like print, where too many citations can feel interruptive. On the web, it is just part of the visual vocabulary. It encourages a more expansive tapestry where references can be used for more than just acknowledging source material. One can also point to definitions, tangential pages, or jokes. The hyperlink is among the singularly magical elements of the web.

The Times is among the worst offenders for not crediting others’ past reporting by linking to it. You will notice every one of the links in its paragraph is to another Times story, which makes sense in this context. (It would be perhaps slightly more powerful if each was to a different publication to capture the breadth of this uniquely odious man, but then the Times runs the risk of pointing readers to something outside its known editorial context.) In other reporting, there is simply no excuse for the Times to not link to someone else’s preceding work.

Link often, link generously.

We Are Cursed to Have More Connector Standards and, Also, Articles About Connector Standards

In short.

In long:

Ten years ago, the USB Implementers Forum finalized the specification for USB-C 1.0, and the world rejoiced, for it would free us from the burden of remembering which was the correct orientation of the plug relative to the socket. And lo, it was good.

And then we all actually got around to using USB-C devices and realized this whole thing is a little bit messy. While there was now a universal connector, the capabilities of the cable can range from those which support only power with maybe a trickle of data, all the way up to others which carry data at USB4 speeds. But that is not all. It might also support various Thunderbolt standards — 3, 4, and now 5 — and DisplayPort. That is neat. Again, this is all done using the same connector size and shape, and with cables that look practically interchangeable.

Which brings us to Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic — a requisite destination for intellectualized lukewarm takes — about his cable woes:

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters — and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. […]

Reader — and I mean this with respect — I am only too willing to bore you to tears with another article about USB-C. Bogost is right, though. The original USB standard unified the many different ports one was expected to use for peripherals. It basically succeeded for at least two of them: the keyboard and mouse. Both require minimal data, so they work fine regardless of whether the port supports USB 1.1 or USB 3.1. Such standardization also came with loads more benefits, too, like reducing setup and configuration once necessary for even basic peripherals.

Where things got complicated is when data transfer speeds actually matter. USB 1.1 — the first version most people actually used — topped out at 12 Mbits per second; USB 2.0 could do 480 Mbits per second. Even so, the ports and cables looked identical. If you plugged an external hard drive into your computer using the wrong cable, you would notice because it would crawl.

This begat more specs allowing for higher speeds, requiring new cables and — sometimes — new connectors. And it was kind of a mess. So the USB-IF got together and created USB-C, which at least solves some of these problems. It is a more elegant connector and, so far, it has been flexible enough to support a wide range of uses.

That is kind of the problem with it, though: the connector can do everything, but there is no easy way to see what capabilities are supported by either the port or the cable. Put another way, if you connect a Thunderbolt 5 hard drive using the same cable as you use to charge new Magic Mouse and Keyboard, you will notice, just as you did twenty years ago.

Bogost, after describing his array of gadgets connected by USB-A, USB-C, and micro-HDMI:

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. […]

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. […]

If the ultimate goal is a single cable and connector that can do everything from charge your bike light to connect a RAID array — do we still have RAID arrays? — I think that is foolish.

But I do not think that is the expectation. For one thing, note Bogost’s correctly chosen phrasing of what the E.U.’s standard entails. All devices have unified around a single charging standard, which does not demand any specialized cable. I use a Thunderbolt cable to sync my iPhone and charge my third-party keyboard, because I cannot be tamed.1 The same is true of my laptop and also my wife’s, the headphones I am wearing right now, a Bluetooth speaker we have kicking around, our Nintendo Switch, and my bicycle tire pump. Having one cable for all this stuff rules.

If you need higher speeds, though, I would bet you know that. If the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 matters to you, you are a different person than most. And, I would wager, you are probably happy that you can connect a fancy Thunderbolt drive to any old USB-C port and still read its contents, even if it is not as fast. That kind of compatibility is great.

Lookalike connectors are nothing new, however. P.C. users probably remember the days of PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which had the same plugs but were not interchangeable. 3.5mm circular ports were used for audio out, audio in, microphone — separate from audio in, for some reason — and individual speakers. This was such a mess that Microsoft and Intel decided PC ports needed colour-coding (PDF). Even proprietary connectors have this problem, as Apple demonstrated with some Lightning accessories.

We are doomed to repeat this so long as the same connectors and cables describe a wide range of capabilities. But solving that should never be the expectation. We should be glad to unify around standards for at least basic functions like charging and usable data transfer. USB-C faced an uphill battle because we probably had — and still have — devices which use other connectors. While my tire pump uses USB-C, my bike light charges using some flavour of mini-USB port. I do not know which. I have one cable that works and I dare not lose it.

Every newer standard is going to face an increasingly steep hill. USB-C now has a supranational government body mandating its use for wired charging in many devices which, for all its benefits, is also a hurdle if and when someone wants to build some device in which it would be difficult to accommodate a USB-C port. That I am struggling to think of a concrete example is perhaps an indicator of the specificity of such a product and, also, that I am not in the position of dreaming up such products.

But even without that regulatory oversight, any new standard will have to supplant a growing array of USB-C devices. We may not get another attempt at this kind of universality for a long time yet. It is a good thing USB-C is quite an elegant connector, and such a seemingly flexible set of standards.

  1. I still use a Lightning Magic Trackpad which means I used to charge it and sync my iPhone with the same cable, albeit more slowly. Apparently, the new USB-C Magic Trackpad is incompatible with my 2017 iMac, though I am not entirely sure why. Bluetooth, maybe? Standards! ↥︎

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co

Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock: browse 2.0x faster

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2× faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.

Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews; it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad. and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Humane Is Trying to License Its Operating System, a Move It Swears Was the Strategy All Along ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going:

Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind of operating system powered the AI Pin. It was clear that AI Pin wasn’t merely a hardware wrapper for ChatGPT; it was software developed for the oncoming AI future.

Sitting across from me, Chaudhri is sharing details about lessons learned and his company’s core product, CosmOS, the AI operating system. The company now plans to license the software to those interested in AI-powered devices.

There is a diagram in this article illustrating the difference between the architecture of a “traditional O.S.” and that of this “A.I. operating system”, and I think I understand it — but only kind of. The way I interpret Malik’s explanation is that it works almost like a mix of plugins and a sort of universal data layer.

The way this was demonstrated to Malik was as though it was a car’s operating system. Malik says it was “much more intelligent than, say, an Alexa device”, which might very well be true. But the skills which were demonstrated are nominally possible with assistants that already exist in smartphone operating systems, albeit in a way that sounds far less sophisticated than Humane is able to deliver. If you have a relatively recent car, you can plug in your phone and get very close to that capability today.

I am reminded of Jason Snell’s article from the week of the A.I. Pin’s launch, in which he pointed out “how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies”. The hard part for Humane — whether pinned to your shirt or installed in your car’s dashboard — is that it wants you to maintain an entirely new digital space in a world of far bigger companies that want to keep you in their insular environments.

Malik:

Licensing an operating system can be a lucrative business. Microsoft’s Windows windfall is legendary. However, there are other less obvious examples. In 1998, I wrote about a company called Integrated Systems that made an OS for devices ranging from dishwashers to microwaves. In 2000, it merged with Wind River Systems, and their OS powered all these devices that are computers but don’t look like computers — washing machines, for example. Wind River is now owned by Intel.

Wind River was sold by Intel in 2018 to TPG, a private equity firm, nine years after buying it for $884 million. The financial terms of TPG’s purchase were not disclosed, which does not suggest Intel made a killing and kind of implies it lost money. Just four years and predictable layoffs later, it sold the company for $4.3 billion. This is not really a correction to Malik’s point; more of an addition.

Update: If the idea behind an A.I. operating system is that it can figure out just the right process for the current task, and Danny Gonzalez’s experience is anything to go by, count me out. No thank you.

Apple Intelligence Is Coming to the E.U. In April ⇥ apple.com

Apple on Monday in the Irish press release for this week’s operating system updates:

Mac users in the EU can access Apple Intelligence in U.S. English with macOS Sequoia 15.1. This April, Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU. This will include many of the core features of Apple Intelligence, including Writing Tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more.

This timeline coincides with additional language availability. In December, Apple will roll out support for some non-U.S. versions of English; in April, it will add other languages like French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So there is functionally no delay in the availability of Apple Intelligence for many E.U. users — at least, not if they would like to use these features in their first language.

I would not go so far as to argue this has all been a charade designed to turn public sentiment against E.U. regulators. By cautioning users — and shareholders — back in June, Apple indicated this rollout would not entirely be on its own schedule, just as it did in September when it needed regulatory approval for sleep apnea notifications and the AirPods hearing aid feature. It is not really a problem. Besides, Apple has not meaningfully location-gated Apple Intelligence in the same way as it has, say, E.U.-specific features.

Romain Dillet, TechCrunch:

From this list, it turns out all Apple Intelligence features are coming to the EU, except … notification summaries? We’ve reached out to Apple for more details about what’s not coming to the EU and an Apple spokesperson sent us the following statement: […]

The statement is not particularly illuminating, only repeating the bullet point from the press release and saying the company is still working through DMA compliance questions. It is not even clear that notification summaries are not part of the feature set rolling out in April.

All we know right now is that Apple’s E.U. rollout of Apple Intelligence coincides with the availability of a bunch of European languages. The April language pack notably also adds support for two other English languages — Indian and Singaporean — plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. No word on availability in China, but Tim Cook is working on it.

Apple Ends a Week of Announcements by Acquiring Pixelmator ⇥ pixelmator.com

Pixelmator:

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Congratulations to the Pixelmator team.

I have to say this is a little unsurprising. Pixelmator’s whole vibe is very Apple, but not; I cited the company’s website as an example of one aping Apple’s own.

I am also a touch worried. The first thing I thought of was Apple’s purchase of Workflow, now Shortcuts. In the past seven years, the capability of Shortcuts has been expanded tremendously, but it has also been routinely broken in iOS updates. There are frequent errors with syncing, actions stop working without warning, and compatibility does not always feel like a priority in new first-party software releases.

So, good for Pixelmator for attracting Apple’s attention and delivering quality software for years — software which can go toe-to-toe with offerings from companies far larger and richer. I hope this acquisition is great news for users, too, but I think it is fair to be apprehensive.

When Does Instagram Decide a Nipple Becomes Female? ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition. 

Every week she uploads a shirtless self portrait to Instagram alongside another image which shows whether a number of AI-powered tools from big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft that attempt to automatically classify the gender of a person see her as male or female. Each image also includes a sequential number, year, and the number of weeks since Ada Ada Ada started hormone therapy.

You want to see great art made with the help of artificial intelligence? Here it is — though probably not in the way one might have expected.

In the first post to be removed by Instagram, Ada Ada Ada calls it a “victory”, and it truly sounds validating. Instagram has made her point and, though she is still able to post photos, you can flip through her pinned story archives “censorship” and “censorship 2” to see how Meta’s systems interpret other posts.

StopTheMadness Pro Version 11 ⇥ underpassapp.com

Jeff Johnson:

First, StopTheMadness Pro 11.0 adds the ability to copy a text fragment link from selected text in Safari, using a contextual menu item on macOS or Show Menu on Tap on iOS. The previous two links are themselves examples of text fragments; the first link, when clicked, scrolls to and highlights the text “Contextual Menu Items (macOS Safari)” on the linked page.

[…]

I was inspired to add this feature by Nick Heer’s blog post about text fragments.

I promise to use this overwhelming power for good.

These and other features await in a great update to one of my very favourite extensions. Unfortunately, the VisionOS version is stuck in App Review hell. But if you use any of Apple’s other platforms, good things await.

All Macs Except the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Now Have a Minimum of 16 GB of RAM ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

It’s officially the end of an era. Apple on Wednesday held the last day of its super week of Mac announcements, this time with the launch of a new generation MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. But the company also did something else: it upgraded all Macs with 16GB of RAM as standard, putting an end to 8GB Macs.

A legitimate finally, and good news. 8GB of RAM has been standard on MacBook Air models since 2017, and on retina MacBook Pro models and iMacs since 2012.

For completeness, you can still buy a new Mac with 8GB of RAM: the Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air which, nevertheless, still supports Apple Intelligence. Not that I would have expected Apple’s volume sales discount Mac to get this bump but, still, it is not yet the end of an era.

Calgary Public Library Says It Is Slowly Resuming Services After Attempted Ransomware Attack ⇥ calgarylibrary.ca

A press release from Calgary Public Library:

The Library’s Technology Team and existing cybersecurity partners engaged a Microsoft Incident Response team to support containment procedures and complete a thorough investigation. The findings of the investigation confirm that while servers were compromised, no business, employee or membership data was affected. The incident was identified as an attempted ransomware attack, which the Library’s monitoring systems successfully blocked. The Library was not in communication with any threat agent during this period and has provided information to appropriate authorities to support further investigation.

This comes just over two weeks after the library announced it was targeted. It is not offering many further details yet, such as an estimate for its staged return to normal service, but it sounds like it will be on a faster track than the attacks which affected libraries in London, Seattle, and Toronto. If serious damage has been avoided, I am thankful given those comparable situations.

World Leaders’ Security Personnel Are on Strava ⇥ apnews.com

Sébastien Bourdon, Antoine Schirer, and Sinead McCausland, of Le Monde, are in the middle of a three-part investigation into how Strava compromises the travel activities of world leaders. It is paywalled, but two videos, in English, have been published on YouTube.

Sylvie Corbet, with an AP summary which, despite citing Le Monde, does not link back to the publication:

Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.

In statements from the GSPR and U.S. Secret Service, officials disputed the likelihood this is meaningfully harmful. World leaders’ trips are usually public information and, while there is minor risk in the advance disclosure of where the leader is staying, officials say there are enough layers of security. That seems right to me. What Le Monde identified is a theoretical concern, but it has not demonstrated an actual problem.

To illustrate: one example the journalists showed was a meeting between hopefully-just-one-time president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un at a hotel in Singapore. The trip was public knowledge and announced a week before it occurred. Five days prior, however, a Secret Service agent was preparing the hotel for Trump’s arrival. Anyone monitoring this Secret Service agent’s activity might at most infer Trump would be travelling to Singapore, or perhaps that this agent is on holiday. Now, if Le Monde had found similar Strava activity from Singaporean police and North Korea’s Supreme Guard Command, that would be more notable. Small amounts of quasi-private information are rarely valuable, but the combination of several sources can be.

If this feels familiar, it is because Nathan Ruser and other researchers found secret military bases in 2018 using data from Strava. All these cases feel like a legacy of decisions made at a time when public social activity was seen as inherently good.

Sorry Siri

If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application. I cannot think of any other application which comes preloaded with a new iPhone that so greatly underdelivers, and has for so long.

Siri is thirteen years old, and we all know the story: beneath the more natural language querying is a fairly standard command-and-control system. In those years, Apple has updated the scope of its knowledge and responses, but because the user interface is not primarily a visual one, its outer boundaries are fuzzy. It has limits, but a user cannot know what they are until they try something and it fails. Complaining about Siri is both trite and evergreen. Yes, Siri has sucked forever, but maybe this time will be different.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced Siri would get a whole new set of powers thanks to Apple Intelligence. Users could, Apple said, speak with more natural phrasing. It also said Siri would understand the user’s “personal context” — their unique set of apps, contacts, and communications. All of that sounds great, but I have been down this road before. Apple has often promised improvements to Siri that have not turned it into the compelling voice-activated digital assistant it is marketed to be.

I was not optimistic — and I am glad — because Siri in iOS 18.1 is still pretty poor, with a couple of exceptions: its new visual presentation is fantastic, and type-to-Siri is nice. It is unclear exactly how Siri is enhanced with Apple Intelligence — more on this later — but this version is exactly as frustrating as those before it, in all the same ways.

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

  • …to text a contact by using only their first name.

  • …for directions to locations using the place name.

  • …to play music by artist, album, or song.

  • …to start and stop timers.

  • …to convert from one set of units to another.

  • …to translate from one language to another.

  • …about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.

  • …all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably. Even Craig Federighi, when he was asked by Joanna Stern, spoke of his pretty limited usage:

I’m opening my garage, I’m closing my garage, I’m turning on my lights.

All kinds of things, I’m sending messages, I’m setting timers.

I do not want to put too much weight on this single response, but these are weak examples. This is what he could think of off the top of his head? That is all? I get it; I do not use it for much, either. And, as Om Malik points out, even the global metrics Federighi cites in the same answer do not paint a picture of success.

So, a refresh, and I will start with something positive: its new visual interface. Instead of a floating orb, the entire display warps and colour-shifts before being surrounded by a glowing border, as though enveloped in a dense magical vapour. Depending on how you activate Siri, the glow will originate from a different spot: from the power button, if you press and hold it; or from the bottom of the display, if you say “Siri” or “Hey, Siri”.

You can also now invoke text-based Siri — perfect for times when you do not want to speak aloud — by double-tapping the home bar. There has long been an option to type to Siri, but it has not been surfaced this easily, and I like it.

That is kind of where the good news stops, at least in my testing. I have rarely had a problem with Siri’s ability to understand what I am saying — I have a flat, Canadian accent, and I can usually speak without pauses or repeating words. There are writers who are more capable of testing for improvements for people with disabilities.

No, the things which Siri has flubbed have always been, for me, in its actions. Some of those should be new in iOS 18.1, or at least newly refined, but it is hard to know which. While Siri looks entirely different in this release, it is unclear what new capabilities it possesses. The full release notes say it can understand spoken queries better, and it has product documentation, but it seems anything else will be coming in future updates. I know a feature Apple calls “onscreen awareness”, which can interpret what is displayed, is one of those. I also know some personal context features will be released later — Apple says a user “could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details” no matter how they were sent. This is all coming later and, presumably, some of it requires third-party developer buy-in.

But who reads and remembers the release notes? What we all see is a brand-new Siri, and what we hear about is Apple Intelligence. Surely there must be some improvements beyond being able to ask the Apple assistant about the company’s own products, right? Well, if there are, I struggled to find them. Here are the actual interactions I have had in beta versions of iOS 18.1 for each thing in the list above:

  • I asked Siri to text Ellis — not their real name — a contact I text regularly. It began a message to a different Ellis I have in my contacts, to whom I have not spoken in over ten years.

    Similarly, I asked it to text someone I have messaged on an ongoing basis for fifteen years. Their thread is pinned to the top of Messages. Before it would let me text them, it asked if I wanted it to send it to their phone number or their email address.

  • I was driving and I asked for directions to Walmart. Its first suggestion was farther away and opposite the direction I was already travelling.

  • I asked Siri to “play the new album from Better Lovers”, an artist I have in my library and an album that I recently listened to in Apple Music. No matter my enunciation, it responded by playing an album from the Backseat Lovers, a band I have never listened to.

    I asked Siri to play an album which contains a song of the same name. This is understandably ambiguous if I do not explicitly state “play the album” or “play the song“. However, instead of asking for clarification when there is a collision like this, it just rolls the dice. Sometimes it plays the album, sometimes the song. But I am an album listener more often than I am a song listener, and my interactions with Siri and Apple Music should reflect that.

  • Siri starts timers without issue. It is one of few things which behaves reliably. But when I asked it to “stop the timer”, it asked me to clarify “which one?” between one active timer and two already-stopped timers. It should just stop the sole active timer; why would I ask it to stop a stopped timer?

  • I asked Siri “how much does a quarter cup of butter weigh?” and it converts that to litres or — because my device is set to U.S. localization for the purposes of testing Apple Intelligence — gallons. Those are volumetric measurements, not weight-based. If I ask Siri “what is the weight of a quarter cup of butter?”, it searches the web. I have to explicitly say “convert one quarter cup of butter to grams”.

  • I asked Siri “what is puente in English?” and it informed me I needed to use the Translate app. Apparently, you can only translate from Siri’s language — English, in this case — to another language when using Siri. Translating from a different language cannot be done with Siri alone.

  • I rarely see the Priority Messages feature in Mail, so I asked Siri about it. I tried different ways to phrase my question, like “what is the Priority Messages feature in Mail?”, but it would not return any documentation about this feature.

Maybe I am using Siri wrong, or expecting too much. Perhaps all of this is a beta problem. But, aside from the last bullet, these are the kinds of things Apple has said Siri can do for over a decade, and it does not do so predictably or reliably. I have had similar or identical problems with Siri in non-beta versions of iOS. Today, while using the released version of iOS 18.1, I asked it if a nearby deli was open. It gave me the hours for a deli in Spokane — hundreds of kilometres away, and in a different country.

This all feels like it may be, perhaps, a side effect of treating an iPhone as an entire widget with a governed set of software add-ons. The quality of the voice assistant is just one of a number of factors to consider when buying a smartphone, and the predictably poor Siri is probably not going to be a deciding factor for many.

But the whole widget has its advantages — you can find plenty of people discussing those, and Apple’s many marketing pieces will dutifully recite them. Since its debut in 2011, Apple has rarely put Siri front-and-centre in its iPhone advertising campaigns, but it is doing just that with the iPhone 16. It is showcasing features which rely on whole-device control — features that, admittedly, will not be shipping for many months. But the message is there: Siri has a deep understanding of your world and can present just the right information for you. Yet, as I continue to find out, it does not do that for me. It does not know who I text in the first-party Messages app or what music I listen to in Apple Music.

Would Siri be such a festering scab if it had competitors within iOS? Thanks to an extremely permissive legal environment around the world in which businesses scoop up vast amounts of behavioural data to make it slightly easier to market laundry detergent and dropshipped widgets, there is a risk to granting this kind of access to some third-party product. But if there were policies to make that less worrisome, and if Apple permitted it, there would be more intense pressure to improve Siri — and, for that matter, all voice assistants tied to specific devices.

The rollout of Apple Intelligence is uncharacteristically piecemeal and messy. Apple did not promise a big Siri overhaul in this version of iOS 18.1. But by giving it a new design, Apple communicates something is different. It is not — at least, not yet. Maybe it will be one day. Nothing about Siri’s state over the past decade-plus gives me hope that it will, however. I have barely noticed improvements in the things Apple says it should do better in iOS 18.1, like preserving context and changing my mind mid-dictation.

Siri remains software I distrust. Like Federighi, I would struggle to list my usage beyond a handful of simple commands — timers, reminders, and the occasional message. Anything else, and it remains easier and more reliable to wash my hands if I am kneading pizza dough, or park the car if I am driving, and do things myself.

Setting Up Mastodon Author Tags ⇥ rknight.me

Robb Knight:

Mastodon 4.3 released today with a bunch of features but the one most people, including me, are excited about is author tags – this isn’t the name of them but they also don’t seem to have a proper name as far as I can tell. Anyway, you need to do two things to get the “More from X” section you can see in the screenshot above. The first is to add the fediverse:creator tag to your site in your head, which I previously wrote about here.

Knight published this at the beginning of the month when Mastodon 4.3 was released, but the instance where I run my personal Mastodon account was only updated recently. I like this addition. It removes the need for centralized verification — which can be confusing — and allows any publisher to confirm the legitimacy of individual authors and their work at once.

You Can Use Clean Up With a Clear Conscience ⇥ sixcolors.com

Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors:

The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.

There are clearly ways that image editing tools can overreach. But Clean Up is one of the times when it is valid to compare its effects to those of Photoshop. It is, in fact, the lack of any retouching tools in Apple’s iOS Photos app which has been conspicuous. The difference between the tools available for years in third-party editing apps and Apple’s, though, is in its simplicity — you really do only need to circle an area to remove a distracting element, and it often works pretty well.

Regardless of whether Apple’s A.I. efforts are less advanced than those of its peers or if this is a deliberate decision, I hope we continue to see similar restraint. Image Playgrounds is not tasteful to my eyes, but at least none of it looks photorealistic.

Apple Says It Believes Spatial Images Are the Future of Photography and, in Some Ways, Memory ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel:

Some might believe that Apple isn’t invested in the future of the [Vision] platform either given the niche appeal or the high price, but after speaking with Della Huff (a member of the Product Marketing team at Apple, who oversees all things Camera app and Photos app) and Billy Sorrentino (a member of the the Apple Design Team who works across the company’s entire product line), I left feeling that Apple has every intention of pushing forward in this space.

The two explain that Apple is very much invested in Vision Pro and visionOS because it views the experience they provide as integral to the future of photography. Coming from the company that makes the most popular camera on the planet, that opinion carries significant weight.

I do not mean to be cynical but, well, does it carry significant weight? Of course Apple believes the Vision Pro is the best way to experience photos and videos. The company spent years developing technologies to make the system feel immersive and compelling so, at a minimum, it truly believes the effort was worth it. Also, it is not unreasonable to expect the company to justify the effort, especially after stories about executive retirements and production cutbacks. No wonder Apple is making sure people are aware it is still committed to the space.

But that is not the whole point of this article. The Apple employees interviewed argue — as before — that photos should be representative of an actual event, and that viewing them as an immersive three dimensional reconstruction is, psychologically, much closer to how our memory works. I would love for some bored neuroscientist to fact-check that claim because — and keep in mind I went to art school, so, pinch of salt — it seems to me to conflict with the known fragility of human memory. My suspicion is that this is one reason we are drawn to fuzzier representations of reality: the unique colour representation of film, or the imprecision of a needle reading a vinyl record.

I am not being facetious when I write that I am very curious about how well this actually works compared to standard photos or videos or, indeed, actual memories.

Linking Directly to Text Fragments ⇥ alfy.blog

Ahmad Alfy:

My first encounter with text fragments was through links generated by Google Search results. Initially, I assumed it was a Chrome-specific feature and not part of a broader web standard. However, I soon realized that this functionality was actually built upon the open web, available to any browser that chooses to implement it.

As someone who writes essays containing citations, this is one of the nicest additions to the web that I wish was easier to use in Safari. What I, like Alfy, want to be able to do is highlight a specific phrase and copy a direct link.

Also, something I often forget is that you can link directly to specific pages of a PDF file by appending #page= and then the page number.

Update: Turns out Rogue Amoeba has a bookmarklet for putting a link to the selected text in your clipboard. Very nice. (Thanks to Nick Vance.)

‘Everything Is a Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Trust Anything’ ⇥ youtube.com

Hank Green, who lives in Montana, spotted something weird with his mail-in ballot: in all categories, the Democrat candidate was listed last. That seemed odd. So he looked it up:

Since every district — and there’s a ton of them — is getting a different ballot anyway, the candidates on each ballet — it turns out — are in a different order.

To eliminate bias, the candidates are initially ordered in alphabetical order. But then, it gets shifted by one for every ballot in the sequence.

Clever.

Green quotes the saying “everything is a conspiracy theory if you don’t know anything” but, as he is wont to point out, that is negative and unkind. A better version, he says, is “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything”.

I like that.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.

I think Masnick’s addition is fair, but also a little redundant, I believe. Someone who lacks trust to the degree of believing fantastical tales about the world is also someone who, upon looking things up, will disregard what they are reading. Being intellectually curious requires trust: in others, to provide accurate information; and in oneself to admit a lack of knowledge, and be able to assess new information.

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

[…]

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

Krebs describes a staggering series of demonstrations by the investigator for Atlas, plaintiff in a suit against Babel Street: precise location tracking of known devices, or dragnet-style tracking of a cluster of devices, basically anywhere. If you or I collected device locations and shared it with others, it would be rightly seen as creepy — at the very least. Yet these intrusive behaviours have been normalized. They are not. What they are doing ought to be criminal.

It is not just Babel Street. Other names have popped up over the years, including Venntel and Fog Data Science. Jack Poulson, who writes All-Source Intelligence, has an update on the former:

According to a public summary of a contract signed in early August, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into the commercial cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics. […]

Gravy Analytics’ data, via Venntel, is apparently one of the sources for Babel Street’s tracking capabilities.

You might remember Babel Street; I have linked to several stories about the company. This reporting was most often done by Byron Tau, then at the Wall Street Journal, and Joseph Cox, then at Vice. Tau wrote a whole book about the commercial surveillance apparatus. Both reporters were also invited to the same demo as Krebs saw; Tau’s story, at Notus, is login-walled:

The demonstration offers a rare look into how easily identifiable people are in these location-based data sets, which brokers claim are “anonymized.”

Such claims do not hold up to scrutiny. The tools in the hands of capable researchers, including law enforcement, can be used to identify specific individuals in many cases. Babel’s tool is explicitly marketed to intelligence analysts and law enforcement officers as a commercially available phone-tracking capability — a way to do a kind of surveillance that once required a search warrant inside the U.S. or was conducted by spy agencies when done outside the U.S.

Cox now writes at 404 Media:

Atlas also searched a school in Philadelphia, which returned nearly 7,000 devices. Due to the large number of phones, it is unlikely that these only include adult teachers, meaning that Babel Street may be holding onto data belonging to children too.

All these stories are worth your time. Even if you are already aware of this industry. Even if you remember that vivid New York Times exploration of an entirely different set of data brokers published six years ago. Even if you think Apple is right to allow users to restrict access to personal data.

This industry is still massive and thriving. It is still embedded in applications on many of our phones, by way of third-party SDKs for analytics, advertising, location services, and more. And it is deranged that the one government that can actually do something about this — the United States — is doing so one company and one case at a time. Every country should be making it illegal to do what Babel Street is capable of. But perhaps it is too rich a source.

Hulu and Disney Plus No Longer Support App Store Payments ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Disney is no longer allowing its customers to sign up for and purchase subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple’s App Store, cutting out any subscription fees that Disney would have needed to pay to Apple for using in-app purchase.

As of writing a day after Disney made this change, Disney Plus is still listed as a member on Apple’s Video Partner Program page. I wrote about that program four years ago in the context of Apple seemingly retconning it into being a longstanding and “established” option available to developers of media applications.

Joe Rosensteel:

More importantly, Disney is increasingly concerned with flexible tiers and bundles so that they can charge more. Especially when Disney launches their ESPN service later, which is almost guaranteed to be incredibly expensive. Disney will try to offset that with bundles. I’m sure Disney might even want to toy around with locking people into yearly subscriptions paid on a monthly basis, à la cable TV.

Despite Apple being Disney’s BFF, Disney needs to have infrastructure to handle all these bundles and tiers, which will be very expensive, so why involve Apple acting as a glorified payment processor?

It is hard to feel anything at all, really, about the business decisions of one massive conglomerate compared to another. But Apple’s subscription management is — in a vacuum and distinct from anything else — one of the nicest around, and it ultimately hurts users that it is so unattractive to some developers when given other options.

On a related note, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission just announced a final set of rules to make cancelling a subscription as easy as starting it. Michael Tsai:

While it was good that in some cases customers could get easier cancellation by paying for an additional layer such as the App Store, I think it makes sense to just make these bad practices illegal.

I am in full agreement. The FTC’s policies are a good idea and should be copied by every national or supranational consumer protection body.

Letting the Joke Overtake the Source Material ⇥ tumblr.com

Hayden Anhedönia, who you might know as Ethel Cain:

I just feel as though there’s a lack of sincerity in the world these days. I speak from personal experience as an artist putting things out into the world, yes, but also as a human being interacting with other human beings on the regular, and I have had my sentiments echoed by many other friends of mine over the past year or so, both artists and non-artists alike. Most of this will be framed through the consumption of art, because that’s my own personal passion in this life of mine, but also the way we interface with each other and process the world around us. […]

I do not know that the internet is becoming less sincere with time, but it sure feels like there is often an unwillingness to engage directly with a topic. How often do you see questions in local subreddits answered with jokes, or stories of horrific events replied to with no emotional intelligence? This has always been an issue in different pockets of the web — and in the real world — but it seems to get worse the larger and looser-knit the group becomes, like if a recommendations-based social media platform yanks something out of context and thrusts it before a whole different audience.

Jokes are fine. But not every reply chain or comment thread needs to become a place to try new bits for a never-to-be-performed standup routine.

Risks and Harms, and Youth and Social Media ⇥ zephoria.substack.com

danah boyd:

Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.

In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”

This is pretty clearly a response to arguments pushed by people like Dr. Jonathan Haidt. One thing he often laments is the decline in kids walking to school and, he says, playing outside with relatively little supervision. This is something he also griped about in his previous book “The Coddling of the American Mind”, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. If you start poking around a little, the factors parents’ cite for their reluctance to allow kids to get to school independently are safety risks: drivers, vehicles, roads, and strangers. You see it in articles from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These are undoubtably risks but, as Haidt himself points out in supplemental material for “Coddling”, efforts should be made to “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”.

Then again, why not both? Kids can be educated on how to use new technologies responsibly and platforms can be pressured to reduce abuses and hostile behaviour. Legislators should be passing privacy-protecting laws. But, as boyd writes, “I don’t think that these harms are unique to children”. If we design roads which are safer for children, they will probably also be safer for everyone — but that does not eliminate risk. A similar effect can be true of technology, too. (I just finished “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”. I found the writing often insufferable, but it is still worth reading.)

I do not have a stake in this game beyond basic humanity and a desire for people to be healthy. I have no expertise in this area. I find it plausible it is difficult to disentangle the influence of social media from other uses of a smartphone and from the broader world. I am not entirely convinced social media platforms have little responsibility for how youth experience their online environment, but I am even less convinced Haidt’s restrictive approach makes sense.

See Also: On the same day boyd’s essay was published, Dr. Candice Odgers and Haidt debated this topic live.

X Has Altered the Deal ⇥ techcrunch.com

X on Wednesday announced a new set of terms, something which is normally a boring and staid affair. But these are a doozy:

Here’s a high-level recap of the primary changes that go into effect on November 15, 2024. You may see an in-app notice about these updates as well.

  • Governing law and forum changes: For users residing outside of the European Union, EFTA States, and the United Kingdom, we’ve updated the governing law and forum for lawsuits to Texas as specified in our terms. […]

Specifically, X says “disputes […] will be brought exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States”. X’s legal address is on a plot of land shared with SpaceX and the Boring Company near Bastrop, which is in the Western District. This particular venue is notable as the federal judge handling current X litigation in the Northern District owns Tesla stock and has not recused himself in X’s suit against Media Matters, despite stepping aside on a similar case because of a much smaller investment in Unilever. The judge, Reed O’Connor, is a real piece of work from the Federalist Society who issues reliably conservative decisions and does not want that power undermined.

An investment in Tesla does not necessarily mean a conflict of interest with X, an ostensibly unrelated company — except it kind of does, right? This is the kind of thing the European Commission is trying to figure out: are all of these different businesses actually related because they share the same uniquely outspoken and influential figurehead? Musk occupies such a particularly central role in all these businesses and it is hard to disentangle him from their place in our society. O’Connor is not the only judge in the district, but it is notable the company is directing legal action to that venue.

But X is only too happy to sue you in any court of its choosing.

Another of the X terms updates:

  • AI and machine learning clarifications: We’ve added language to our Privacy Policy to clarify how we may use the information you share to train artificial intelligence models, generative or otherwise.

This is rude. It is a “clarifi[cation]” described in vague terms, and what it means is that users will no longer be able to opt out of their data being used to train Grok or any other artificial intelligence product. This appears to also include images and video, posts in private accounts and, if I am reading this right, direct messages.

Notably, Grok is developed by xAI, which is a completely separate company from X. See above for how Musk’s companies all seem to bleed together.

  • Updates to reflect how our products and services work: We’ve incorporated updates to better reflect how our existing and upcoming products, features, and services work.

I do not know what this means. There are few product-specific changes between the old and new agreements. There are lots — lots — of new ways X wants to say it is not responsible for anything at all. There is a whole chunk which effectively replicates the protections of Section 230 of the CDA, you now need written permission from X to transfer your account to someone else, and X now spells out its estimated damages from automated traffic: $15,000 USD per million posts every 24 hours.

Oh, yeah, and X is making blocking work worse:

If your posts are set to public, accounts you have blocked will be able to view them, but they will not be able to engage (like, reply, repost, etc.).

The block button is one of the most effective ways to improve one’s social media experience. From removing from your orbit people who you never want to hear from for even mundane reasons, to reducing the ability for someone to stalk or harass, its expected action is vital. This sucks. I bet the main reason this change was made is because Musk is blocked by a lot of people.

All of these changes seem designed to get rid of any remaining user who is not a true believer. Which brings us to today.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Social networking startup Bluesky, which just reported a gain of half a million users over the past day, has now soared into the top five apps on the U.S. App Store and has become the No. 2 app in the Social Networking category, up from No. 181 a week ago, according to data from app intelligence firm Appfigures. The growth is entirely organic, we understand, as Appfigures confirmed the company is not running any App Store Search Ads.

As of writing, Bluesky is the fifth most popular free app in the Canadian iOS App Store, and the second most popular free app in the Social Networking category. Threads is the second most popular free app, and the most popular in the Social Networking category.

X is number 74 on the top free apps list. It remains classified as “News” in the App Store because it, like Twitter, has always compared poorly against other social media apps.

Bloomberg: E.U. Regulators Considering Whether Penalties Levied Against X Should Include Other Musk Businesses ⇥ bloomberg.com

Gian Volpicelli and Samuel Stolton, Bloomberg:

Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc can slap online platforms with fines of as much as 6% of their yearly global revenue for failing to tackle illegal content and disinformation or follow transparency rules. Regulators are considering whether sales from SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI and the Boring Company, in addition to revenue generated from the social network, should be included to determine potential fines against X, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.

These are all businesses privately owned by Elon Musk; Tesla, as a publicly traded company, is reportedly not being factored into the calculation. According to a Bloomberg source, the Commission is trying to decide if they should be penalizing the owner of the business and not the business itself.

Matt Levine, in Bloomberg’s Money Stuff newsletter:

See, you’re not really supposed to do that: X is its own company, with its own corporate structure and owners; 6% of X’s revenue is 6% of X’s revenue, not 6% of the revenue of Musk’s other companies. But if everyone thinks of the Musk Mars Conglomerate as a single company, then there’s a risk that it will be treated that way.

I can see how the penalty formula should not be stymied by carefully structured corporations. There should be a way to fine businesses breaking the law, even if their ownership is obfuscated.

But that is not what is happening here. As reported, this seems like an overreach to me. Even though Musk himself disregards barriers between his companies, as Levine also documents, a penalty for the allegedly illegal behaviour of X should probably be levied only against X.

Correcting the Record on Recording ⇥ findthethread.blog

Dominic Wellington responded thoughtfully to speculation, including my own that a device management key for suppressing screen recording alerts in MacOS Sequoia was added in part because of employee monitoring software:

[…] I know perfectly well that these sorts of tools exist and are deployed by companies, but I suspect they are more prevalent in the sorts of lower-paid jobs that don’t rate fancy expensive Macs. This is why I don’t think employee surveillance (or test proctoring, which is Nick Heer’s other example) can be sufficient explanation for Apple walking back the frequency of this notification. Meanwhile, Zoom et al are near-universal on corporate Macs, and are going to be correspondingly closer to top of mind for administrators of Mac fleets.

This is a fair and considered response, and I think Wellington is right. Even though screen recording capabilities are widespread in employee surveillance products, I do not know that they are very popular. I oversold the likelihood of this being a reflection of that software.

Apple’s Stale Displays ⇥ macrumors.com

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple sells two external displays, including the Pro Display XDR and the Studio Display, but neither has received hardware upgrades in years. In fact, the Pro Display XDR is nearly five years old, having been released all the way back in December 2019.

Via Michael Tsai:

This is not surprising, since Apple has historically taken a long time to update its displays. I don’t think the panels necessarily need to be updated. But it’s disappointing because the Studio Display has well documented camera problems and power issues. I had high hopes that, coming from Apple, it would be reliable as a USB hub, but I end up directly connecting as many storage devices as possible to the meager ports on my MacBook Pro.

Displays are a product category conducive to infrequent updates. The plentiful problems I have been reading with the Studio Display, in particular, worry me. Most sound like software problems, but that is not consolation. Apple’s software quality has been insufficiently great for years and, so, it does not surprise me that a display running iOS is not as reliable as a display that does not use an entire mobile operating system.

Safe Spaces for Bullshit ⇥ theatlantic.com

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

On one of the bonus episodes of “If Books Could Kill”, the hosts discuss Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit” which, after they re-read it, disappointed them. They thought the idea was interesting but were frustrated by the lack of examples and, in trying to find examples of their own, found it difficult to find those which were only bullshit and not lies.

I feel as though they missed the most obvious family of examples: all conspiracy theories necessarily become bullshit, if they did not already begin that way. Consider how the theories cited by Warzel begin with a nugget of truth, from which a theory is extrapolated to serve a narrative role — against (typically) Democratic Party politicians, against Jewish people, against scientific understanding, in favour of a grand unifying order that purportedly explains everything. The absence of evidence for a conspiracy theory is, itself, evidence to believers. All of this is steeped in bullshit. Believers in these things do not care to find understanding in known facts; rather, they perceive the world through this lens and bullshit until it all fits.

This story by Warzel documents that trajectory with perfect pitch. It is now politically incorrect in many circles to have beliefs that align with those of experts in their fields. Regardless of what is being discussed, the only safe speech is aggrieved bullshit. In a disaster, however, such speech can be dangerous if people believe it.

Screen Recording Alert Changes in MacOS 15.1 Beta ⇥ brooksreview.net

Apple in the release notes for MacOS 15.1 beta:

Applications using our deprecated content capture technologies now have enhanced user awareness policies. Users will see fewer dialogs if they regularly use apps in which they have already acknowledged and accepted the risks.

John Gruber:

Why in the world didn’t Apple take regular use of a screen-recording app into account all along?

Benjamin Brooks:

I think this is the question you ask when you have not used a Corporate Mac in the last 4-5 years. For those who are, you know that companies install applications which take screenshots and screen recordings of certain or all activities being done on the Mac. You know, for security.

When users began noticing the screen recording permissions prompt over the summer, I remember lots of people speculating Apple added it because of possible spyware or domestic violence behaviour. That is a plausible explanation.

But Brooks’ keen observation is something I, in hindsight, should have also considered, and I am kicking myself for forgetting about the possibility. I now remember linking to things like employee surveillance software and online test proctoring — applications which monitor users’ screens effectively by force, something one will agree to unless they want to change jobs or not complete an exam. I believe this is supported by — and casts a new light upon — a device management key available to system administrators for suppressing those permissions prompts.

‘Kill List’ ⇥ wondery.com

I am not much of a true crime podcast listener, but the first three episodes of “Kill List” — Overcast link — have transfixed me.

Jamie Bartlett:

Besa Mafia was a dark net site offering hitmen for hire. It worked something like this: a user could connect to the site using the Tor browser and request a hit. They’d send over some bitcoin (prices started from $5,000 USD for ‘death by shotgun’). Then they’d upload the name, address, photographs, of who they wanted killed. Plus any extra requests: make it look like a bungled robbery; need it done next week, etc. The website owner, a mysterious Romanian called ‘Yura’ would then connect them with a specialist hitman to carry out the commission.

[…]

In the end, Carl investigated one hundred and seventy five kill requests. Each one a wannabe murderer. Each one a potential victim — who Carl often phones and break the crazy news. “The hardest calls I’ve ever made” Carl tells me. “How do you explain that someone wants you dead?!” (Carl would be indirect, gentle. He tried to make sure the victim felt in control. But often they hung up. “They didn’t believe me. They thought I was a scammer”).

I am not sure I agree with Bartlett’s conclusion — “more and more complex crimes will be solved by podcast journalists” is only true to the extent any crime is “solved” by any journalist — but it does appear this particular podcast has had quite the impact already. What a fascinating and dark story this is.

Matt Mullenweg and WordPress Hijack the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin ⇥ advancedcustomfields.com

A bit of background, for those not steeped in the world of WordPress development: there exists a plugin called Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) which allows developers to create near-endless customization options for end clients in the standard page and post editor. It is hard to explain in a single paragraph — the WordPress.com guide is a good overview — but its utility is so singular as to be an essential component for many WordPress developers.

ACF was created by Elliot Condon who, in 2021, sold it to Delicious Brains. At this point, it was used on millions of websites, a few of which I built. I consider it near-irreplaceable for some specific and tricky development tasks. A year later, the entire Delicious Brains plugin catalogue was sold to WPEngine.

Matt Mullenweg:

On behalf of the WordPress security team, I am announcing that we are invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines and are forking Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) into a new plugin, Secure Custom Fields. SCF has been updated to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem.

[…]

Similar situations have happened before, but not at this scale. This is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine’s legal attacks, we do not anticipate this happening for other plugins.

This is an awfully casual way of announcing WordPress is hijacking one of the most popular third-party plugins in the directory. Mullenweg cites policy for doing so — WordPress can “make changes to a plugin, without developer consent, in the interest of public safety” — but the latter paragraph I quoted above makes clear the actual motive here. The “security problem” triggering this extraordinary action is a real but modest change to expand a patch from a previous update. But WordPress has removed the ability for WPEngine to make money off its own plugin — and if users have automatic plugin updates turned on, their ACF installation will be overwritten with WordPress’ unauthorized copy.

Iain Poulson, of ACF:

The change to our published distribution, and under our ‘slug’ which uniquely identifies the ACF plugin and code that our users trust in the WordPress.org plugin repository, is inconsistent with open source values and principles. The change made by Mullenweg is maliciously being used to update millions of existing installations of ACF with code that is unapproved and untrusted by the Advanced Custom Fields team.

It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.

What the Hell Is Going on With WordPress and WPEngine? ⇥ context.center

I have been trying to stay informed of the hostile relationship between WordPress, Automattic, and Matt Mullenweg, and third-party hosting company WPEngine. Aram Zucker-Scharff put together a helpful and massive set of links to news coverage. Michael Tsai has a good collection of links, too, and Emma Roth and Samantha Cole have published notable articles.

From a distance, it looks like an expensive pissing match between a bunch of increasingly unlikable parties, and I would very much appreciate if it never affects my self-hosted version of WordPress. Maybe it is a little confusing that WPEngine is not affiliated with WordPress, but I only learned this week that WordPress.org is personally owned by Mullenweg and is not actually affiliated with Automattic or WordPress.com. From Mullenweg’s perspective, this confusion is beneficial, but the confusion with WPEngine is not. From my perspective, I would not like to be confused.

Also, if Mullenweg is mad about WPEngine — and Silver Lake, its private equity owner — benefitting from the open source nature of WordPress without what he feels is adequate compensation, I am not sure he has a leg to stand on. It does not sound like WPEngine is doing anything illegal. It is perhaps rude or immoral to build a private business named after and on the back of an open source project without significantly contributing, but surely that is the risk of developing software with that license. I am probably missing something here.

XOXO 2024 Conference Videos ⇥ xoxofest.com

Well, add XOXO to the list of conferences I was never able to attend. The final edition occurred this year and it looked pretty special.

Happily, if you — as I — were unable to attend in person, Andy Baio has begun uploading videos of this year’s talks. I have watched those from Cabel Sasser, Dan Olson, Molly White, and Sarah Jeong. These are all worth your time — and so are, I am sure, the ones I have not yet seen.

Update: Be sure to watch Sasser’s talk before exploring an amazing archive he is assembling. Seriously — watch first, then click.