I made a new Mastodon bot, called “I Hope This Email Finds You.” Twice a day it proposes a novel way to conclude that sentence that opens so many emails. (It uses phrases from Google Books that include the phrase “finds you.”) I’ve been having fun reading these, so I turned it into a bot because you, too, might have fun reading them.
This bot is excellent. At times sweet, at times absurd.
10+ years ago I created an annual list of websites that FORBADE you from linking to them, DEMANDED you write to ask for permission or LIMITED links to only their home page. Royal Mail even promised to post me a paper licence.
Now a decade has passed, let’s see who’s still doing it … And yes I’ve linked to your websites to prove this. Uh oh.
Some of these are even more bizarre than a blanket link ban, like Which? limiting people to a maximum of ten links to their site per webpage. Why would anyone want to prevent links? Perhaps terms like these are are a clumsy way of restricting hotlinking or poorly protected nonpublic sections of a site, but there are better options than some legal document with questionable enforceability.
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Mark Stenberg, reporting for Adweek in January:
Digital media company G/O Media is shopping around its portfolio of editorial assets in hopes of securing buyers for individual titles, part of a broader effort to divest the properties ahead of another challenging year for the media industry, according to four people familiar with the efforts.
[…]
“Your reporting is largely incorrect. As with many multi-title media properties, we are always entertaining opportunities,” said a representative for G/O Media. “We have sold sites and purchased sites. Having said that, we do not comment on transaction rumors and speculation.”
It was “largely incorrect”, according to G/O Media, to suggest the company was thinking about selling off its portfolio of sites just two months after selling two of its sites to Paste. CEO Jim Spanfeller even gave an “exclusive” interview to Sara Fischer, of Axios, to dispel the rumours. Weeks later, the company sold and purged the shell of Deadspin, and then it sold the A/V Club and the Takeout.
Katie Robertson, New York Times:
G/O Media announced on Thursday that it had sold The Onion, a satirical news site, to a group of digital media veterans.
[…]
The real-life Global Tetrahedron is owned by Jeff Lawson, a co-founder and former chief executive of the technology communications company Twilio. The chief executive is Ben Collins, who was a senior reporter at NBC News until recently.
G/O Media still owns six publications — for now. For its part, the Onion says you should feed it one dollar.
In a perfect world, Microsoft would take security seriously again. It would be transparent about breaches. Its execs would stop gloating about increasing security service revenue at a time when Microsoft can’t secure its own employees, let alone customers, against incidents that are happening with increasing frequency. And Microsoft would include must-have security capabilities as part of existing subscriptions instead of selling them as add-ons.
Microsoft sure is lucky to be so deeply enmeshed in the operations of businesses and governments that it is able to sell security for a fee because its all-in-one offering has basically no competition.
Hardika Singh, Wall Street Journal:
Bartash isn’t alone. Scores of individual investors have piled into Tesla shares in recent years, lured by the company’s technology, visionary chief executive and mammoth stock market gains. Through the end of last year, the stock was one of the top 10 wealth-creating companies for investors over the past decade, according to Morningstar, rising from about $10, on a split-adjusted basis, to $250.
But the shares have since hit a rough patch, down almost 40% in 2024. Tesla is the second-worst performer in the S&P 500 and off more than 60% from its peak in November 2021. The company’s market value fell below $500 billion last week for the first time in nearly a year, after climbing as high as $1.235 trillion.
It is hard to blame these people for sticking with Tesla despite its actual performance. Tesla’s stock is in the tank for the year, and Singh’s story was published Monday, one day before a bleak earnings report. Income was less than half was it was a year prior, revenue and margin fell, and it sold many fewer vehicles than it made.
Even so, Tesla’s stock jumped 12% because its CEO said “A.I.”, and he recently promised a robotaxi service once again and a less expensive model. Investors apparently believe him.
Ed Zitron read a bunch of the emails released in United States v. Google and believes the quality of Google’s search engine has been in decline since early 2019 thanks to new leadership:
These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.
Because these are only a sampling of the emails released as part of that trial, they paint a necessarily incomplete picture, and one that is possibly wrong.
Zitron’s reporting focuses on similar themes to Megan Gray’s retracted story for Wired in which Google allegedly “alters queries billions of times a day”, each time making a “behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company”. These claims were not actually proven in court, as far as I can figure out, but gestures toward them were found by Davey Alba and Leah Nylen of Bloomberg, and can be found in Zitron’s story:
A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying he was “annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.” in a long email, he explained how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could “increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways,” like turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking,” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable with this.” He also added that this was the reason he didn’t believe that queries were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense about the weakness of queries was to create “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.”
This is not the same thing as what Gray claimed, even though it is along similar lines. Google allegedly sacrificed an update to its search engine which improved the quality of results for users because it was less profitable. This was done, according to these emails and documents, with cooperation between search and ads. And it could do all of this because Google’s management team knows it has a search monopoly and that does not come cheap.
In iOS 17.4, Apple introduced a new system called eligibilityd. This works with countryd (which you might have heard about when it first appeared in iOS 16.2) and the Apple ID system to decide where you physically are. The idea is that multiple sources need to agree on where you are, before giving you access to features such as those mandated by the Digital Markets Act.
I cannot remember a time when Apple so aggressively restricted system features by geography. Most often, options show up if you change the device region in Settings; that is how Apple News can be accessed outside regions where it is officially available. But someone accessing News is only positive for Apple. There are other things locked by geography, like like Apple Cash, which only works with U.S. banking information, and special obligations to China which are active for devices sold only there. Those are legal obligations which someone either deeply tied to systems in a particular country — in the case of the former — or something people likely would not want.
The DMA features, on the other hand, are probably something a lot of users would like access to. Perhaps not a majority of iPhone owners, but a lot of them. Engineers at Apple have worked very hard to make a lot of features, and also to prevent them from being used. Clearly, these are features Apple did not want to make at all, but it is notable how much effort it is making to lock them down.
Following the passage of the Online News Act, the Media Ecosystem Observatory studied the behaviour of Canadian Facebook and Instagram users. The resulting report (PDF) is a brief but useful read.
Sara Parker, et al. summarizing two of its findings:
The Facebook Pages of national news outlets lost approximately 64% of their Facebook engagement following the end of news availability for Canadian users. Local news outlets lost approximately 85%. Almost half of all local news outlets stopped posting on Facebook entirely in the four months following the ban.
Engagement with politically relevant pages and groups has remained unchanged since the ban, suggesting politically-oriented users have not reduced their Facebook usage.
Surprised? Me neither.
According to these researchers’ findings, many users simply posted screenshots of news articles without a direct link, thereby depriving media outlets of even meagre ad revenue. Interestingly, among a set of known misinformation sources catalogued by the Global Disinformation Index, sharing of news-like nonsense also dropped following Meta’s policy change.
I have a feeling many longtime Mac users are like me: some special characters are typed directly, some are done through expansion, and the rest — never used before and never expected to be used again — come through the Character Viewer.
When the Mac turned forty earlier this year, I made an effort to mention the “ability to type special characters by using the option key” as one of my favourite MacOS features. But I neglected to mention text replacement — which I use to transform, for example, cmdkey into ⌘, and xtimes into × — and Character Viewer. You may know the latter as the emoji picker, but you can click the icon in the upper-right of the panel to display the full Character Viewer. Oh, and another way of inserting special characters is to simply hold down a key on the keyboard, just like on iOS.
All of these seem like pretty intuitive ways to insert characters which do not appear on the keyboard, and do not require you to memorize Unicode values. I use all the entry methods available in MacOS and they, collectively, are among my favourite system features.
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Aaron Tilley, Liza Lin, and Jeff Horwitz, Wall Street Journal:
Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp and Threads as well as messaging platforms Signal and Telegram were taken off the Chinese App Store Friday. Apple said it was told to remove certain apps because of national security concerns, without specifying which.
“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree,” an Apple spokesperson said.
A good argument for supporting protocols over platforms. Threads may have been ejected but it seems impossibly difficult to prohibit ActivityPub entirely. It is not as though HTTP or SMTP are banned in China.
Frank Thorp V, Sahil Kapur and Ryan Nobles, NBC News:
The Senate voted to reauthorize a powerful surveillance tool the U.S. government describes as critical to combating terrorism, after defeating efforts by civil liberties advocates on the left and right to rein it in.
The vote of 60-34 sends the bill to President Joe Biden, who has championed it. The legislation extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, for two more years.
Contrary to the New York Times’ framing last year, the nay votes were hardly a picture of the “far-right”. Dissenters were almost a 50–50 split between Republicans and Democrats, with slightly more of the latter. Sadly, even with some long-overdue Republican support, the nay votes did not “imperil” this capability.
Marc Zwillinger, Steve Lane, and Jacob Sommer, of the ZwillGen law firm, on an amendment which will compel more providers to turn over records:
The new amendment is a marginal improvement over the last go-around, but it is still problematic. It is not a change that “narrowly updates the definition of electronic communication service provider under Section 702.” Like the FRRA, it: (1) drops the qualifier “communication” from the class of covered “service providers;” (2) makes access to communications-carrying equipment enough to establish eligibility; and (3) adds “custodian” to the list of individuals who can be forced to provide assistance. But unlike the FRRA, it then enumerates a list of business types that cannot be considered ECSPs, including public accommodations, dwellings, restaurants, and community facilities.
American readers, if you need cheering up, do note the House of Representatives passed the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act.
John Gruber, in 2020:
Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable. No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.
Ian Betteridge contrasted this view against one of Gruber’s recent articles, in which his stance appears to have softened on the seriousness of tracking:
I wonder what happened to turn John’s attitude from “no action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong” to defending Facebook’s “right” to choose how it invades people’s privacy? Or is he suggesting that a private company is entitled to defend people’s privacy, but governments are not?
To put it another way, should people have an expectation of how private information is used and collected, or should that be wildly different depending on which companies they interact with? Is the status quo of handling private data in the U.S. the optimal legal balance?
John Gruber, responding:
I’ve seen a bit of pushback along this line recently, more or less asking: How come I was against Meta’s tracking but now seem for it? I don’t see any contradiction or change in my position though. The only thing I’d change in the 2020 piece Betteridge quotes is this sentence, which Betteridge emphasizes: “No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.” I should have inserted an adjective before “tracking” — it’s non-consensual tracking I object to, especially tracking that’s downright surreptitious. Not tracking in and of itself.
Given my review of Byron Tau’s new book, you might expect me to wholly disagree with the idea that anyone can provide consent. I do not — in theory. But in practice and in most circumstances right now, it probably is impossible for users to provide meaningful consent to all of the digital products and services they use.
Consider what full informed consent looks like for Facebook — and just Facebook. One would need to indicate they have read and understood each section of its simplified privacy policy, not just tick the blanket “I Agree” box, or permit it using the App Tracking Transparency dialog. Facebook should show exactly what it is collecting and how it is using this information. Every time a policy changes, Facebook should get an affirmative agreement, too, from each user; none of this by continuing to use the product, you indicate your agreement nonsense.
And this is just Facebook. Imagine that across all your accounts everywhere. We have a taste of that on the web with cookie consent panels, and on iOS with the myriad dialogs thrown by app features like accessing your contacts. A typical camera app will likely ask you for four different permissions out of the gate: camera, microphone, photo library, and location access. Adding yet more consents and dialog boxes is hardly an effective solution.
Meta is probably one of the more agreeable players in this racket, too. It hoards data; it does not share much of it. And it has a brand to protect. Data brokers are far worse because nobody knows who they are or what they collect, share, and merge. Scale the informed consent model above across all data brokers you interact with, in each app or website you use. As an example, Het Laatste Nieuws, a popular Dutch-language news site in Belgium, shows in its cookie consent dialog it has over one hundred advertising partners, among the lowest numbers I have seen. (For comparison, Le Monde has over five hundred.) True consent requires you to understand those privacy policies, too. What does Nexxen collect? Which other websites, apps, or products do you use which also partner with Nexxen? Can you find Nexxen in HLN’s partner list? (Probably not — the privacy policies for the first three advertisers I was going to use as an example in that sentence returned 404 errors, and I only found Nexxen because I clicked on the policy for Unruly, which rebranded last year.)
This is a mess from the perspective of users and site operators. A core principle of informed consent is an understanding of risk. Are people presented with adequate information about the risks of accepting tracking? No, not really. Meanwhile, website owners do not want to interrupt visitors with cookie consent forms; they want to interrupt them with email newsletter sign-up forms. Nobody wants to manage a vast database of specific consent agreements.
Gruber is reacting to a draft decision (PDF) by the European Data Protection Board — specifically:
It has to be concluded that, in most cases, it will not be possible for large online platforms to comply with the requirements for valid consent if they confront users only with a binary choice between consenting to processing of personal data for behavioural advertising purposes and paying a fee.
The EDPB’s justification for this is based largely on similar arguments to those I have made above, though it limits the scope of this decision to platforms of gatekeeper scale for similar interconnected rationales as it has used to define those platforms’ unique responsibilities. Interestingly, the EDPB says the mere existence of a fee at all is enough to question whether there is a truly free choice when a no-cost option is also available. It seems to want a third way: no behaviourally informed advertising, at no financial cost to users.
I am not sure there is a good reason to limit to gatekeepers restrictions regarding the use of behavioural advertising. There need to be stricter controls around tracking so that users may have informed consent, regardless of whether it is a corporate behemoth, a news publisher, or a weather app. If we want informed consent, we should have it, but the status quo is a poor excuse for truly informed, truly free consent.
Victoria Song, the Verge:
I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.
This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated.
This is one of those heartbreaking essays that will sit with me for a long time. It is nominally about how Humane’s wearable gadget struggled with translation features, but it is so much greater, as you can surmise from the quote.
After I linked to Josh Dzieza’s long report about subsea cable repair, I got an email from Joshua Ochs who pointed me to Neal Stephenson’s 1996 essay, published in Wired, about the laying of the FLAG cable.
There is some poetry here. The only way I read that original article, published it, and then received that email is because of all of this infrastructure. I may be writing this on a laptop with no wires coming out of it, but that is not really how I am connected to the internet. Instead, one cable after another has carried my bytes.
If you have not read it before, I think you should set aside some time for it. But do note: it is over forty thousand words. You should still read it. Also, there are parts of it which have not aged well — from predictable cultural perspectives, to a comparison made of the demise of the Library of Alexandria which will make you double-take the dateline. And I recommend spending time with the whole thing because it is amazing.
Tim Maly, writing for Nieman fifteen years after its publication:
The dot-com world’s dangerously myopic narcissism was visible to those with the right kind of eyes, and “Mother Earth Mother Board” is 42,535 words of emergency optical surgery. Stephenson wants to show you that everything’s been done before, only crazier.
The essay is apparently a legendary work but, as with so many critically lauded things, it escaped my field of view. If you have time this weekend, do not let it escape yours.
Mediana, Benediktus Krisna Yogatama, Mawar Kusuma Wulan, Kompas (as translated by Safari):
Indonesia is a destination country visited by the boss of the technology giant company Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. The second visit has been announced by the Minister of Communication and Information Budi Arie Setiadi since mid-March 2024.
[…]
Apple has an obligation to build four [developer] academies, namely in Bali, Batam, Surabaya, and South Tangerang. The total investment value reaches Rp 1.6 trillion.
[…]
Regarding the construction of the factory, Agus said that his party would encourage it because Indonesia already has a factory of cell phone components such as batteries or cables, so that Apple can use domestic products.
I saw a few conspicuous cars waiting at the VIP terminal of Jakarta’s smaller airport yesterday. Turns out the private jet carrying the Apple entourage arrived just a few minutes after my discount flight took off. Practically rubbing shoulders over here.
Anyway, that tipped me off to the plane’s tail number and, based on its path this evening — local time — Cook and company have just landed in Singapore. It seems plausible to me Cook could also visit Malaysia to open the country’s first Apple Store, which looked close to finished last month. Thanks to Just Another Rakyat for that tip.
Meanwhile, Apple and Epic Games are fighting again, this time in a court in Melbourne. Perhaps Cook is also on his way to participate in that. There sure is a lot going on in Southeast Asia and Australia right now.
Update: Well my guesses were completely wrong about Cook’s schedule. After Singapore, he went back to California.
The new A.I. Pin from Humane is, according to those who have used one, bad. Even if you accept the premise of wearing a smart speaker and use it to do a bunch of the stuff for which you used to rely on your phone, it is not good at those things — again, according to those who have used one, and I have not. Why is it apparently controversial to say that with intention?
Cherlynn Low, of Engadget, “cannot recommend anyone spend this much money for the one or two things it does adequately”. David Pierce, of the Verge, says it is “so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways”. Arun Maini said the “total amount of effort required to perform any given action is just higher with the Pin”. Raymond Wong, of Inverse, wrote the most optimistic review of all those I saw but, after needing a factory reset of his review unit and then a wind gust blowing it off his shirt, it sounds like he is only convinced by the prospect of future versions, not the “textbook […] first-generation product” he is actually using.
It was Marques Brownlee’s blunt review title — “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now” — which caught the attention of a moderately popular Twitter user. The review itself was more like Wong’s, seeing some promise in the concept while dismissing this implementation, but the tweet itself courted controversy. Is the role of a reviewer to be kind to businesses even if their products suck, or is it to be honest?
I do not think it makes sense to dwell on an individual tweet. What is more interesting to me is how generous all of the reviewers have been so far, even while reaching such bleak conclusions. Despite having a list of cons including “unreliable”, and “slow”, and Low saying she burned herself “several times” because it was so hot, Engadget still gave it a score of 50 out of 100. The Verge gave it a 4 out of 10, and compared the product’s reception to that of the “dumpster fire” Nexus Q of 2012, which it gave a score of 5 out of 10.
That last review is a relevant historic artifact. The Nexus Q was a $300 audio and video receiver which users would, in theory, connect to a television or a Hi-Fi speaker system. It was controlled through software on an Android phone, and its standout feature was collaborative playlists. But the Verge found it had “connectivity problems” with different phones and different Nexus Q review units, videos looked “noticeably poor”, it was under-featured, and different friends adding music to the playback queue worked badly. Aside from the pretty hardware, there simply was no there there, and it was canned before a wide release.
But that was from Google, an established global corporation. Humane may have plenty of ex-Apple staff and lots of venture capital money, but it is still a new company. I have no problem grading on a reasonable curve. But how in the world is the Humane getting 40% or 50% of a perfect grade when every reviewer seems to think this product is bad and advises people not to buy one?
Even so, all of them seem compelled to give it the kind of tepid score you would expect for something that is flawed, but not a disaster. Some of the problems do not seem to be a direct fault of Humane; they are a consequence of the technological order. But that does not justify spending $700 plus a $24 per month subscription which you will need to keep paying in perpetuity to prevent your A.I. Pin from becoming a fridge magnet.
Maybe this is just a problem with trying to assign numerical scores. I have repeatedly complained about this because I think it gives mixed messages. What people need to know is whether something is worth buying, which consists of two factors: whether it addresses an actual problem, and whether it is effective at solving that problem. It appears the answer to the first is “maybe”, and the answer to the second is “hell no”. It does not matter how nice the hardware may be, or how interesting the laser projecting screen is. It apparently burns you while you barely use it.
In that light, giving this product an even tepid score is misleading. It is not respectful of potential buyers nor of the team which helped make it. It seems there are many smart people at Humane who thought they had a very good idea, and many people were intrigued. If a reviewer’s experience was poor, it is not cruel for them to be honest and say that it is, in a word, bad.
Katie Notopoulos, Business Insider:
But then there’s the other, more existential argument against phones: We are spending all our free moments with a screen shoved in our faces, mindlessly scrolling for dopamine and ignoring the world around us. Time spent on your phone is bad; time spent doing anything else is good.
This argument I just can’t get on board with. I love mindless scrolling; I find it immensely enjoyable. I love flipping through TikTok, browsing tweets, poking around Reddit. I’ll pop into the group chat. Maybe if I have some extra time, I’ll go to my happy place and watch some movie trailers on YouTube.
I thought this was a good rebuttal to the seemingly constant moral panic over how much we use screens. Notopoulos is careful to disclaim she is writing as an adult “with a fully formed frontal lobe” and this advice probably does not apply in the same way to children.
I do not think we should consider this kind of debate settled one way or another. I think it is reasonable to ask whether it is a good idea for everybody to carry everywhere a slot machine for their feelings. Social media platforms are incentivized to increase time spent and user retention, which they can juice by making nicer products and through sneaky design patterns. It seems like grounds to worry about phone use if it is impacting other aspects of one’s life, like if they are forgetting to take care of themselves or do household tasks because they spend so much time on their phone.
But if you reading on your phone instead of reading a newspaper, or watching a YouTube video instead of watching a show on TV, what are you actually doing differently? Those seem like interchangeable activities.
Omer Benjakob and Eliza Triantafillou, Haaretz:
According to the documents, in 2022 Intellexa presented a proof of concept for a system called Aladdin that enables the remote infection of a specific mobile telephone device through online advertisements. This is the first time it has been revealed that a company outside of Israel has developed such a spyware tool – which was considered the cutting edge of Israel’s offensive cyber. At that time, in Israel, the Defense Ministry was actively working to prevent Israeli companies from marketing identical spyware tools abroad.
[…]
It is not known what happened to Aladdin. It is possible it was never developed or if it was, if it was ever actually sold. Adint systems are considered extremely complicated to develop and maintain over time, and it is not clear if Intellexa moved ahead with trying to develop it into a working product and if they ever pitched it or sold it.
This was described by Intellexa as a near zero-click solution, in that it only requires someone to be using a web browser for their device to be affected; it does not require someone to tap on an ad. iPhones were apparently not affected by this zero-click ad infection capability, and required at least one tap, but that is barely comforting considering how frequently I accidentally tap on ads in third-party apps on my iPhone.1
Via Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:
Online ads help website owners, including this one, generate revenue. But online ad exchanges can be abused to push malicious code to a target’s device.
[…]
While no phone or computer can ever be completely unhackable, ad blockers can be effective in stopping malvertising and ad-based malware before it ever hits the browser.
The technology described by Haaretz is clearly among the most cutting edge and it seems unlikely any random person would be caught in its net. The whole point, after all, is specific and targeted malware delivery — something which, as with surveillance, is possible thanks to the way online advertising works. While there are many ad blockers available for browsers, including site sponsor Magic Lasso, there are no user-friendly answers for in-app ads on iOS, many of which use the same networks and technologies as those in browsers. This is an unfortunate limitation of the way iOS works.
This is not really the point of this post, but it seems like something changed a few major iOS versions ago and I now find myself accidentally tapping way more often. This is especially noticeable when I am just trying to stop an in-progress scroll. ↥︎
Josh Dzieza, the Verge:
[…] It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”
I bet this essay appears on a good many best of lists at the end of the year. It is tremendous. Necessary reporting well-told and richly illustrated. Normally, I find these kinds of high production value presentations more distracting than they are helpful, but this is exactly the opposite. A wonderful exploration of the kind of quiet profession that makes core parts of life possible for everybody else.
Eric Geller, Wired:
Microsoft’s almost untouchable position is the result of several intermingling factors. It is by far the US government’s most important technology supplier, powering computers, document drafting, and email conversations everywhere from the Pentagon to the State Department to the FBI. It is a critical partner in the government’s cyberdefense initiatives, with almost unparalleled insights about hackers’ activities and sweeping capabilities to disrupt their operations. And its executives and lobbyists have relentlessly marketed the company as a leading force for a digitally safer world.
While one part of Microsoft is busy creating headlines for imminent A.I.-powered election propaganda on behalf of the Chinese government, another is failing to protect its own systems from breaches allegedly by Chinese state groups. This is not solely a U.S. problem, either; lots of governments worldwide rely on Microsoft’s products and services.
Reading these studies proved an existential body blow because I am 31, apparently on the precipice of becoming a musical dinosaur. I like to think I’m special — that my high-minded dedication to culture makes me an exceptionally unique snowflake — but apparently I’m just like everybody else. I turned 30, and now I’m in a musical rut, content to have an AI bot DJ pacify me with the songs of my youth.
Patterns like these seem to be everywhere. Our learning capabilities fossilize, and everything from music to food to society begins to feel uncomfortable. It seems important, I think, for us to fight that tendency for ourselves and be willing to embrace new and different things. Music seems like as good a place as any to start. Keep trying new stuff.
Update: Only slightly related but just read, Lydia Davis’ “How He Changed Over Time”.
In the 1970s and 1980s, in-house researchers at Exxon began to understand how crude oil and its derivatives were leading to environmental devestation. They were among the first to comprehensively connect the use of their company’s core products to the warming of the Earth, and they predicted some of the harms which would result. But their research was treated as mere suggestion by Exxon because the effects of obvious legislation would “alter profoundly the strategic direction of the energy industry”. It would be a business nightmare.
Forty years later, the world has concluded its warmest year in recorded history by starting another. Perhaps we would have been more able to act if businesses like Exxon equivocated less all these years. Instead, they publicly created confusion and minimized lawmakers’ knowledge. The continued success of their industry lay in keeping these secrets.
“The success lies in the secrecy” is a shibboleth of the private surveillance industry, as described in Byron Tau’s new book, “Means of Control”. It is easy to find parallels to my opening anecdote throughout though, to be clear, a direct comparison to human-led ecological destruction is a knowingly exaggerated metaphor. The erosion of privacy and civil liberties is horrifying in its own right, and shares key attributes: those in the industry knew what they were doing and allowed it to persist because it was lucrative and, in a post-9/11 landscape, ostensibly justified.
Tau’s byline is likely familiar to anyone interested in online privacy. For several years at the Wall Street Journal, he produced dozens of deeply reported articles about the intertwined businesses of online advertising, smartphone software, data brokers, and intelligence agencies. Tau no longer writes for the Journal, but “Means of Control” is an expansion of that earlier work and carefully arranged into a coherent set of stories.
Tau’s book, like so many others describing the current state of surveillance, begins with the terrorists attacks of September 11 2001. This was the early days, when Acxiom realized it could connect its consumer data set to flight and passport records. The U.S. government ate it up and its appetite proved insatiable. Tau documents the growth of an industry that did not exist — could not exist — before the invention of electronic transactions, targeted advertising, virtually limitless digital storage, and near-universal smartphone use. This rapid transformation occurred not only with little regulatory oversight, but with government encouragement, including through investments in startups like Dataminr, GeoIQ, PlaceIQ, and PlanetRisk.
In near-chronological order, Tau tells the stories which have defined this era. Remember when documentation released by Edward Snowden showed how data created by mobile ad networks was being used by intelligence services? Or how a group of Colorado Catholics bought up location data for outing priests who used gay-targeted dating apps? Or how a defence contractor quietly operates nContext, an adtech firm, which permits the U.S. intelligence apparatus to effectively wiretap the global digital ad market? Regarding the latter, Tau writes of a meeting he had with a source who showed him a “list of all of the advertising exchanges that America’s intelligence agencies had access to”, and who told him American adversaries were doing the exact same thing.
What impresses most about this book is not the volume of specific incidents — though it certainly delivers on that front — but the way they are all woven together into a broader narrative perhaps best summarized by Tau himself: “classified does not mean better”. That can be true for volume and variety, and it is also true for the relative ease with which it is available. Tracking someone halfway around the world no longer requires flying people in or even paying off people on the ground. Someone in a Virginia office park can just make that happen and likely so, too, can other someones in Moscow and Sydney and Pyongyang and Ottawa, all powered by data from companies based in friendly and hostile nations alike.
The tension running through Tau’s book is in the compromise I feel he attempts to strike between acknowledging the national security utility of a surveillance state while describing how the U.S. has abdicated the standards of privacy and freedom it has long claimed are foundational rights. His reporting often reads as an understandable combination of awe and disgust. The U.S. has, it seems, slid in the direction of the kinds of authoritarian states its administration routinely criticizes. But Tau is right to clarify in the book’s epilogue that the U.S. is not, for example, China, separated from the standards of the latter by “a thin membrane of laws, norms, social capital, and — perhaps most of all — a lingering culture of discomfort” with concentrated state power. However, the preceding chapters of the book show questions about power do not fully extend into the private sector, where there has long been pride in the scale and global reach of U.S. businesses but concern about their influence. Tau’s reporting shows how U.S. privacy standards have been exported worldwide. For a more pedestrian example, consider the frequent praise–complaint sandwiches of Amazon, Meta, Starbucks, and Walmart, to throw a few names out there.
Corporate self-governance is an entirely inadequate response. Just about every data broker and intermediary from Tau’s writing which I looked up promised it was “privacy-first” or used similar language. Every business insists in marketing literature it is concerned about privacy and says they ensure they are careful about how they collect and use information, and they have been doing so for decades — yet here we are. Entire industries have been built on the backs of tissue-thin user consent and a flexible definition of “privacy”.
When polled, people say they are concerned about how corporations and the government collect and use data. Still, when lawmakers mandate choices for users about their data collection preferences, the results do not appear to show a society that cares about personal privacy.
In response to the E.U.’s General Data Privacy Regulation, websites decided they wanted to continue collecting and sharing loads of data with advertisers, so they created the now-ubiquitous cookie consent sheet. The GPDR does not explicitly mandate this mechanism and many remain non-compliant with the rules and intention of the law, but they are a particularly common form of user consent. However, if you arrive at a website and it asks you whether you are okay with it sharing your personal data with hundreds of ad tech firms, are you providing meaningful consent with a single button click? Hardly.
Similarly, something like 10–40% of iOS users agree to allow apps to track them. In the E.U., the cost of opting out of Meta’s tracking will be €6–10 per month which, I assume, few people will pay.
All of these examples illustrate how inadequately we assess cost, utility, and risk. It is tempting to think of this as a personal responsibility issue akin to cigarette smoking but, as we are so often reminded, none of this data is particularly valuable in isolation — it must be aggregated in vast amounts. It is therefore much more like an environmental problem.
As with global warming, exposé after exposé after exposé is written about how our failure to act has produced extraordinary consequences. All of the technologies powering targeted advertising have enabled grotesque and pervasive surveillance as Tau documents so thoroughly. Yet these are abstract concerns compared to a fee to use Instagram, or the prospect of reading hundreds of privacy policies with a lawyer and negotiating each of them so that one may have a smidge of control over their private information.
There are technical answers to many of these concerns, and there are also policy answers. There is no reason both should not be used.
I have become increasingly convinced the best legal solution is one which creates a framework limiting the scope of data collection, restricting it to only that which is necessary to perform user-selected tasks, and preventing mass retention of bulk data. Above all, users should not be able to choose a model that puts them in obvious future peril. Many of you probably live in a society where so much is subject to consumer choice. What I wrote sounds pretty drastic, but it is not. If anything, it is substantially less radical than the status quo that permits such expansive surveillance on the basis that we “agreed” to it.
Any such policy should also be paired with something like the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act in the U.S. — similar legislation is desperately needed in Canada as well — to prevent sneaky exclusions from longstanding legal principles.
Last month, Wired reported that Near Intelligence — a data broker you can read more about in Tau’s book — was able to trace dozens of individual trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. That could be a powerful investigative tool. It is also very strange and pretty creepy all that information was held by some random company you probably have not heard of or thought about outside stories like these. I am obviously not defending the horrendous shit Epstein and his friends did. But it is really, really weird that Near is capable of producing this data set. When interviewed by Wired, Eva Galperin, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said “I just don’t know how many more of these stories we need to have in order to get strong privacy regulations.”
Exactly. Yet I have long been convinced an effective privacy bill could not be implemented in either the United States nor European Union, and certainly not with any degree of urgency. And, no, Matt Stoller: de facto rules on the backs of specific FTC decisions do not count. Real laws are needed. But the products and services which would be affected are too popular and too powerful. The E.U. is home to dozens of ad tech firms that promise full identity resolution. The U.S. would not want to destroy such an important economic sector, either.
Imagine my surprise when, while I was in middle of writing this review, U.S. lawmakers announced the American Privacy Rights Act (PDF). If passed, it would give individuals more control over how their information — including biological identifiers — may be collected, used, and retained. Importantly, it requires data minimization by default. It would be the most comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the U.S., and it also promises various security protections and remedies, though I think lawmakers’ promise to “prevent data from being hacked or stolen” might be a smidge unrealistic.
Such rules would more-or-less match the GDPR in setting a global privacy regime that other countries would be expected to meet, since so much of the world’s data is processed in the U.S. or otherwise under U.S. legal jurisdiction. The proposed law borrows heavily from the state-level California Consumer Privacy Act, too. My worry is that it will be treated by corporations similarly to the GDPR and CCPA by continuing to offload decision-making to users while taking advantage of a deliberate imbalance of power. Still, any progress on this front is necessary.
So, too, is it useful for anyone to help us understand how corporations and governments have jointly benefitted from privacy-hostile technologies. Tau’s “Means of Control” is one such example. You should read it. It is a deep exploration of one specific angle of how data flows from consumer software to surprising recipients. You may think you know this story, but I bet you will learn something. Even if you are not a government target — I cannot imagine I am — it is a reminder that the global private surveillance industry only functions because we all participate, however unwillingly. People get tracked based on their own devices, but also those around them. That is perhaps among the most offensive conclusions of Tau’s reporting. We have all been conscripted for any government buying this data. It only works because it is everywhere and used by everybody.
For all they have erred, democracies are not authoritarian societies. Without reporting like Tau’s, we would be unable to see what our own governments are doing and — just as important — how that differs from actual police states. As Tau writes, “in China, the state wants you to know you’re being watched. In America, the success lies in the secrecy“. Well, the secret is out. We now know what is happening despite the best efforts of an industry to keep it quiet, just like we know the Earth is heating up. Both problems massively affect our lived environment. Nobody — least of all me — would seriously compare the two. But we can say the same about each of them: now we know. We have the information. Now comes the hard part: regaining control.
The thing about talks from Cabel Sasser is that he has mentioned on more than one occasion that he dislikes giving them, yet he is extremely good at storytelling and public speaking. This one is no exception. He spoke at GDC this year about the development of the Playdate console, and it is worth the hour of your time.
I was perhaps a little optimistic about Humane’s A.I. Pin. It seems like an interesting attempt at doing something a little different and outside the mainstream device space. But the early reviews have dampened any of intrigue I may have had.
In its current guise, it is a solution in search of problems. It does not even have a timer function — the one thing I can count on Siri to deliver. For someone with a disability, something like this could make a lot of sense if it worked reliably and quickly, but it seems like it is too finicky.
Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector:
Facebook’s unrefined artificial intelligence misclassified a Kansas Reflector article about climate change as a security risk, and in a cascade of failures blocked the domains of news sites that published the article, according to technology experts interviewed for this story and Facebook’s public statements.
The punchline of this story was, is, and remains not that Meta maliciously censored a journalist for criticizing them, but that it built a fundamentally broken service for ubiquitously intermediating global discourse at such a large scale that it can’t even cogently explain how the service works.
This was always a sufficient explanation for the Reflector situation, and one that does not require any level of deliberate censorship or conspiracy for such a small target. Yet, it seems as though many of those who boosted the narrative that Facebook blocks critical reporting cannot seem to shake that. I got the above link from Marisa Kabas, who commented:
They’re allowing shitty AI to run their multi-billion dollar platforms, which somehow knows to block content critical of them as a cybersecurity threat.
That is not an accurate summary of what has transpired, especially if you read it with the wink-and-nod tone I imply from its phrasing. There is plenty to criticize about the control Meta exercises and the way in which it moderates its platforms without resorting to nonsense.
Nicole Lipman, N+1 magazine:
But both things can be true. SHEIN might be singled out as the worst fast-fashion retailer because the United States fears and envies China and has a particular interest in denigrating its successes, and it might be singled out because it is, in fact, the worst: the greatest polluter, the most flagrant IP thief, the largest violator of human rights, and — arguably worst of all — the most profitable. SHEIN has shown the world that unsustainability pays. Together with the companies that will follow its example of ultra-fast fashion, SHEIN will accelerate the already-rapid acceleration toward global catastrophe.
Consider the volume of critical press coverage, for decades, documenting outrageous practices in any number of consumer industries — fashion, technology, whatever — and then consider how those same industries, and even the same businesses, continue to grow and thrive. We now live in a world of Shein, Temu, and Amazon, all of which are the exact opposite of the values we claim to hold, yet are hugely popular and growing. The worse they are, the more they are rewarded.
See Also: Michael Hobbes’ deep 2016 investigation, for the Huffington Post, about the “myth of the ethical shopper”.
Speaking of repairability, Samuel Gibbs reviewed, for the Guardian, the new Fairphone Fairbuds:
The Fairbuds cost £129 (€149) and are designed from the ground up to be as sustainable as possible, combining fair trade and recycled materials with replaceable parts that can be swapped in and out with a standard small screwdriver.
[…]
The earbuds have a little door hidden behind a silicone sleeve, which opens to reveal a small button battery ready to be replaced once it wears out. The design seems so simple you wonder why no one has tried it before.
Gibbs noted an audio sync issue which the company says it was working on. Otherwise, these seem to be perfectly fine true water-resistant wireless earbuds with approximately similar battery life to Apple’s AirPods Pro.
It turns out I am currently in the market for a new set of wireless earbuds. My second-generation AirPods are down to just a few minutes of usable battery charge, and I have been reluctant to buy another set because of the fixed lifespan owing to the glued-in battery. I am sure there are ways these are less good than AirPods but, for my priorities, I think these are the right trade-off. Sadly, they are not yet available in Canada.
Jason Kottke shares some breathtaking shots from the total eclipse that crossed much of North America, including my personal favourite by Notorious RBMK. I missed the entire thing, but I have already put something in my calendar for August 2044.
Apple, in a press release that does not once contain either of the words “Oregon” or “regulation”:
Today Apple announced an upcoming enhancement to existing repair processes that will enable customers and independent repair providers to utilize used Apple parts in repairs. Beginning with select iPhone models this fall, the new process is designed to maintain an iPhone user’s privacy, security, and safety, while offering consumers more options, increasing product longevity, and minimizing the environmental impact of a repair. Used genuine Apple parts will now benefit from the full functionality and security afforded by the original factory calibration, just like new genuine Apple parts.
Apple goes on to say that parts calibration will soon be done on-device, and goes further to provide a genuinely good use of pairing: if parts are scavenged from iPhones with Activation Lock enabled, they will be “restricted” in some way.
This all sounds pretty great and, it would seem, entirely triggered by regulatory changes. But it also seems to me that it is designed to challenge the parts pairing section of Oregon’s right-to-repair law (PDF). Specifically, this portion:
(b) For consumer electronic equipment that is manufactured for the first time, and first sold or used in this state, after January 1, 2025, an original equipment manufacturer may not use parts pairing to:
[…]
(B) Reduce the functionality or performance of consumer electronic equipment; […]
A clause a little later in the same section does not oblige manufacturers to “make available special documentation, tools, parts or other devices or implements that would disable or override, without an owner’s authorization, anti-theft” features set by the device owner. It looks like the total meaning of the law is that Apple’s anti-theft features would be prohibited in Oregon because doing so would reduce their functionality. That is my non-lawyer reading, anyway: it creates an understandable reason for pairing, and grounds for Apple to fight it. Just a guess, but I bet this comes up later.
Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters:
Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies.
The early results come after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a “choice screen.”
I was skeptical about the efficacy of a browser ballot screen, but I guess I should not be surprised by this news. It turns out people may pick other options if you make the choice more prominent.
Via Ben Lovejoy, who covered the report for 9to5Mac but, as of publishing, has not linked to it, and writes:
Other browser companies claim that the process is convoluted, and provides no information on any of the browsers listed. They say this means iPhone users are more likely to simply pick the name they know, which is most likely to be Safari.
I have seen others suggest people may be picking third-party browsers because they are unclear about what a web browser is, or are unsure which one they want to use. I can see legitimacy in both arguments — but that is just how choice works. A lot of people buy the same brand of a product even when they have other options because it is the one they recognize; others choose based on criteria unrelated to the product itself. This is not a new phenomenon. What is fascinating to me is seeing how its application to web browsers on a smartphone is being treated as exotic.
An analogy some have turned to — including me — in describing the difference between first- and third-party apps on the iPhone is that it is something like the difference between store generic brands and national name brands. This has been misleading because users have not, in the case of competitors to first-party apps, been placed in a neutral starting position.
It has so far been a little bit like entering a store where they give you a basket of house brand products and you have to decide which third-party options you want to add or exchange to the basket. Someone needs to really care in order to make the effort. Now, because of this ballot screen, the market is a little more levelled, and it seems some users are responding.
Over the past several years, consequences have been slowly dripping out regarding Apple’s decision to silently curb iPhone performance in cases of poor battery capacity. First, the French competition authorities fined the company, then Apple settled a U.S. class action. In March, the Canadian equivalent class action suit was settled.
Alisha Parchment, CBC News:
Current or former iPhone 6 and 7 users in Canada can now submit a settlement claim for a class-action lawsuit that could pay up to $150 to eligible users of the affected devices.
For clarity, it also covers current and former iPhone 6S and iPhone SE (first generation) owners. If you have owned one of those devices and can find the serial number, you can process a claim, or opt out, until September 3. Quebec residents are ineligible.
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125 million according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross-platform messaging solution after [buying Texts.com][bt] last October.
A lot of people are asking about iMessage on Android… I have zero interest in fighting with Apple, I think instead it’s best to focus on messaging networks that want more engagement from power-user clients. This is an area I’m excited to work on when I return from my sabbatical next month.
Seems like a smart way for Beeper to become better resourced, and a bet by Automattic on more legislation like the Digital Markets Act enabling further interoperable messaging.
Louise Matsakis, Wired:
[Zen] Goziker worked at TikTok for only six months. He didn’t hold a senior position inside the company. His lawsuit, and a second one he filed in March against several US government agencies, makes a number of improbable claims. He asserts that he was put under 24-hour surveillance by TikTok and the FBI while working remotely in Mexico. He claims that US attorney general Merrick Garland, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and other top officials “wickedly instigated” his firing. And he states that the FBI helped the CIA share his private information with foreign governments. The suits do not appear to include evidence for any of these claims.
Here is a copy of Goziker’s complaint and it is quite the read, as you can probably imagine. He alleges, without evidence, corruption between members of the Biden administration trying to gain political favours from TikTok executives, effectively placing himself as the central character in a complex geopolitical plot.
Perhaps more believable is Goziker’s claim that he was the source for the recordings reported on in June 2022 by Emily Baker-White, then at Buzzfeed News, in an article pretentiously framed as the “TikTok Tapes”. While the story’s accuracy is not affected by a bloviating source, it sure makes me more concerned the clips were taken out of context. To be clear, I have no evidence of that and I am sure Baker-White was diligent in reporting out the story.
Zuha Siddiqui, Samriddhi Sakunia, and Faisal Mahmud, Rest of World:
To better understand air quality exposure among gig workers in South Asia, Rest of World gave three gig workers — one each in Lahore, New Delhi, and Dhaka — air quality monitors to wear throughout a regular shift in January. The Atmotube Pro monitors continually tracked their exposure to carcinogenic pollutants — specifically PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 (different sizes of particulate matter), and volatile organic compounds such as benzene and formaldehyde.
[…]
Although pollution can affect anyone exposed to it, delivery riders are particularly vulnerable owing to the nature of their work: They are outside for extended periods of time, often on congested streets, with little shelter from the smog.
These are obviously among the most extreme examples of what delivery workers’ lungs endure. Conditions similar to these are common across Southeast Asia and South Asia, but are not limited to those regions. According to IQAir, many cities in South Africa are dealing with dangerous levels of pollution, and winter months are particularly hazardous in Chile.
Back in the United States, John Oliver spent the main portion of the March 31 edition of “Last Week Tonight” talking about delivery workers. I have to wonder how any of these supposedly revolutionary “gig” jobs will last in their current form.
Update: Corrected to reflect that July is, in fact, winter in Chile. What a silly mistake.
I used to instantly delete emails about a company’s policy changes, but now I’m taking a different approach. Before I delete the email, I delete the account.
[…]
But why am I the one who has to delete the account?
Companies are too comfortable modifying their policies passively over years, because they get to retain user data even if users don’t explicitly consent to a policy change.
Via Eric Schwarz:
I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of this entire post. A few months ago, I decided to clean up old and unnecessary accounts and the amount of companies that either fought me on the request or hid behind the “you don’t live in California” excuse was frustrating. […]
My face is in several places. Back there, before the facial recognition algorithms and the generative AIs, I thought it would be good to show the face to pass… credibility? Confidence? I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t even a necessity as it’s today, because we didn’t have AIs that wrote convincing gibberish. Simpler times.
Three posts on a theme: our inability to forecast technological development or changing incentives. It once used to be prohibitive to retain data collections. When it was physical, it was the kind of thing only librarians and archivists could do, in buildings designed specifically for that purpose. There was built-in encouragement to purge old and irrelevant things. For a few decades now, it has become more costly to delete things — who knows what value some column in a database or a formerly active user’s account could generate? Better hold onto it.
The Calgary Cassette Preservation Society:
Documenting Calgary’s music scene since 2007, this is the new home of the CCPS. We’re bringing over content from our old site and will be adding more stuff (including a long-dreamed of gig poster archive) in the coming months.
Via Boshika Gupta, CBC News:
The website is a work in progress as the team finishes migrating content to the site with the hope that the updated resource will make it super easy for music lovers to look up bands and listen to their recordings.
[Arif] Ansari is also aiming to include other ephemera from Calgary’s music scene, such as historic gig posters.
I am sad to say I had not heard of the original site until I read this CBC article. 2007 was a few years after I began going to gigs by many of the local artists documented on Ansari’s site, and I am hoping to see more recordings as people rummage around bins of old tapes.
Earlier this week, Dave Kendall of documentary production company Prairie Hollow and formerly of a Topeka, Kansas PBS station, wrote in the Kansas Reflector an article criticizing Meta. Kendall says he tried to promote posts on Facebook for a screening of “Hot Times in the Heartland” but was prevented from doing so. A presumably automated message said it was not compliant with its political ads policy.
I will note Meta’s ambiguous and apparently fluid definition of which posts count as political. But Kendall comes to the ridiculous conclusion that “Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion” based solely on his inability to “boost” an existing post. Being pedantic but correct, that means that Meta did not prohibit discussion generally, just the ad.
I cannot fault Kendall’s frustration, however, as he correctly describes the non-specific support page and nonexistent support:
But in the Meta-verse, where it seems virtually impossible to connect with a human being associated with the administration of the platform, rules are rules, and it appears they would prefer to suppress anything that might prove problematic for them.
Exactly. This accurately describes the imbalanced power of even buying ads on Meta’s platforms. Advertisers are Meta’s customers and, unless one is a big spender, they receive little to no guidance. There are only automated checks and catch-all support contacts, neither of which are particularly helpful for anything other than obvious issues.
A short while later in the editorial, however, things take a turn for the wrong again:
The implications of such policies for our democracy are alarming. Why should corporate entities be able to dictate what type of speech or content is acceptable?
In a centralized social network like Facebook, the same automated technologies which flagged this post also flag and remove posts which contribute to a poor community. We already know how lax policies turn out and why those theories do not last in the real world.
Of course, in a decentralized social network, it is possible to create communities with different policies. The same spec that underpins Mastodon, for example, also powers Gab and Truth Social. Perhaps that is more similar to the system which Kendall would prefer — but that is not how Facebook is built.
Whatever issue Facebook flagged regarding those ads — Kendall is not clear, and I suspect that is because Facebook is not clear either — the problems of its poor response intensified later that day.
Clay Wirestone and Sherman Smith, opinion editor and editor-in-chief, respectively, of the Kansas Reflector:
This morning, sometime between 8:20 and 8:50 a.m. Thursday, Facebook removed all posts linking to Kansas Reflector’s website.
This move not only affected Kansas Reflector’s Facebook page, where we link to nearly every story we publish, but the pages of everyone who has ever shared a story from us.
[…]
Coincidentally, the removals happened the same day we published a column from Dave Kendall that is critical of Facebook’s decision to reject certain types of advertising: “When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future.”
Marisa Kabas, writing in the Handbasket:
Something strange started happening Thursday morning: Facebook users who’d at some point in the past posted a link to a story from the Kansas Reflector received notifications that their posts had violated community standards on cybersecurity. “It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software,” the alert said.
[…]
Shortly after 4, it appeared most links to the site were posting properly on Meta properties—Facebook, Instagram Threads — except for one: [Thursday’s column][ed] critical of Facebook.
If you wanted to make a kind-of-lame modern conspiracy movie, this is where the music swells and it becomes a fast-paced techno-thriller. Kabas followed this article with one titled “Here’s the Column Meta Doesn’t Want You to See”, republishing Kendall’s full article “in an attempt to sidestep Meta’s censorship”.
While this interpretation of a deliberate effort by Facebook to silence critical reporting is kind of understandable, given its poor communication and the lack of adequate followup, it hardly strikes me as realistic. In what world would Meta care so much about tepid criticism published by a small news operation that it would take deliberate manual actions to censor it? Even if you believe Meta would be more likely to kneecap a less visible target than, say, a national news outlet, it does not make sense for Facebook to be this actively involved in hiding any of the commentary I have linked to so far.
Facebook’s explanation sounds more plausible to me. Sherman Smith, Kansas Reflector:
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone in a phone call Friday attributed the removal of those posts, along with all Kansas Reflector posts the day before, to “a mistaken security issue that popped up.” He wouldn’t elaborate on how the mistake happened and said there would be no further explanation.
[…]
“It was a security issue related to the Kansas Reflector domain, along with the News From The States domain and The Handbasket domain,” Stone added. “It was not this particular story. It was at the domain level.”
If some system at Meta erroneously flagged as a threat Kendall’s original attempt to boost a post, it makes sense that related stories and domains would also be flagged. Consider how beneficial this same chain of effects could be if there were actually a malicious link: not only does it block the main offending link, but also any adjacent links that look similar, and any copycats or references. That is an entirely fair way to prevent extreme platform abuse. In this case, with large numbers of people trying to post one link that had already been flagged, alongside other similar links, it is easy to see how Meta’s systems might see suspicious behaviour.
For an even simpler example, consider how someone forgetting a password for their account looks exactly the same as someone trying to break into it. On any website worth its salt, you will be slowed down or prevented from trying more than some small number of password attempts, even if you are the actual account owner. This is common security behaviour; Meta’s is merely more advanced.
This is not to say Meta got this right — not even a little bit. I have no reason to carry water for Meta and I have plenty to criticize; more on that later. Unfortunately, the coverage of this non-story has been wildly disproportionate and misses the actual problems. CNN reported that Meta was “accused of censoring” the post. The Wrap said definitively that it “block[ed] Kansas Reflector and MSNBC columnist over op-ed criticizing Facebook”. An article in PC Magazine claimed “Facebook really, really doesn’t want you to read” Kendall’s story.
This is all nonsense.
What is true and deeply frustrating is the weak approach of companies like Meta and Google toward customer service. Both have offloaded the administrative work of approving or rejecting ads to largely automated systems, with often vague and unhelpful responses, because they have prioritized scale above quality from their earliest days.
For contrast, consider how apps made available in Apple’s App Store have always received human review. There are plenty of automated processes, too, which can detect obvious problems like the presence of known malware — but if an app passes those tests, a person sees it before approving or rejecting it. Of course, this system is also deeply flawed; see the vast number of articles and links I have posted over the years about the topic. Any developer can tell you that Apple’s support has problems, too. But you can see a difference in approaches between companies which have scaled with human intervention, and those which have avoided it.
Criticism of Meta in this case is absolutely warranted. It should be held to a higher standard, with more options available for disputing its moderation judgements, and its pathetic response in this case deserves the scrutiny and scorn it is receiving. This is particularly true as it rolls out its de-prioritization of “political” posts in users’ feeds, while continuing to dodge meaningful explanations of what will be affected.
Dion Lefler, the Wichita Eagle:
Both myself and Eagle investigative reporter Chance Swaim have tried to contact Facebook/Meta — although we knew before we started that it’s a waste of time and typing.
Their corporate phone number is a we-don’t-give-a-bleep recording that hangs up on you after two repeats. And their so-called media relations department is where press emails go to die.
Trying to understand how these megalithic corporations make decisions is painful enough, and their ability to dodge the press gives the impression they are not accountable to anybody. They may operate our social spaces and digital marketplaces, but they are oftentimes poor stewards. There will always be problems at this scale. Yet, it often seems as though public-facing tech businesses, in particular, behave as though they are still scrappy upstarts with little responsibility to a larger public. Meta is proud to say its products “empower more than 3 billion people around the world”. I cannot imagine what it is like to design systems which affect that many people. But it is important to criticize the company when it messes up this badly without resorting to conspiracy theories or misleading narratives. The press can do better. But Meta also needs to be more responsive, less hostile, and offer better explanations of how these systems work because, like just about any massive entity, nobody should be trusting it at its word.
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Gaby Del Valle, the Verge:
The complaint emphasizes that, unlike iMessages, iPhone users’ SMS communications with Android users — i.e., green bubble texts — lack encryption.
“Apple forces other platforms to use SMS messaging. It doesn’t allow them to integrate with iMessage or another encrypted message platform built-in,” Cliff Steinhauer, director of information security and engagement at the National Cybersecurity Alliance, told The Verge in a phone interview. Since SMS messages aren’t encrypted, they’re less secure by default.
Apple has previously said its devices would begin supporting RCS, a more secure messaging protocol that will make communications with Android devices encrypted, later this year.
There is a theoretically good discussion in this story about the compromises of the iPhone’s privacy and security model, and its dependence on a benevolent dictator. But these three paragraphs are silly.
It is obviously true that the SMS standard does not have any support for encrypted messages, but that is also true of RCS. Del Valle links to the Verge’s own reporting of Apple’s RCS support in which it says it “could enable support for encryption”, but any end-to-end encryption of RCS messages is currently thanks to implementation decisions made by Google — and Apple will not match that support. Instead, it says it will advocate for end-to-end encryption standards in the RCS spec. The claim that it will “will make communications with Android devices encrypted” is simply untrue.
The key phrase in what Steinhauer said is “built-in” and that will not change when RCS support is added. In fact, it is not even clear to me that most conversation between iOS and Android users happens over SMS. I would not be surprised if that were true, given that it is a universal standard, but most popular third-party messaging applications are now or are in the process of becoming end-to-end encrypted.
It seems to me like the rest of this article raises good arguments about how Apple runs the iPhone and the App Store, from a range of perspectives. One person says commercial spyware impacts Android phones more often, another says a moderate increase in risk is worth it for loosening Apple’s control, and so on. But it feels like a moot discussion because this article is nominally about the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Apple — and its primary complaints are barely related to App Store policy. The closest the DoJ gets is with questions about super apps, cloud streaming gaming apps, and digital wallets, but most of its issues are with Apple’s restrictions around private APIs. The region with a big opening-up of app distribution on iOS is the E.U., and it will be a good experiment in which concerns shake out as true and which are mongering.
Security is one thing to watch out for but, if there are privacy concerns, the U.S. should pass a sweeping nationwide legal framework for privacy. If individual privacy ought to be a right, then it should be spelled out in law, and no company should be able to use it as paper-thin justification for its platform choices. There are times when Apple’s policing decisions seem entirely legitimate, and there are times when it seems — as the DoJ memorably put it — like an “elastic shield”. It would be better for everyone, I think, if there were universal privacy standards that did not depend on the user’s hardware and software choices. Any company could be restrictive if they would like, but there should be a baseline substantially higher than the one that exists today.
Maxwell Zeff, Gizmodo:
Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Zeff says, paraphrasing the Information’s reporting, that 70% of sales needed human review as of 2022, though Amazon says that is inaccurate.
Based on this story and reporting from the Associated Press, it sounds like Amazon is only ending Just Walk Out support in its own stores. According to the AP and Amazon’s customer website and retailer marketing page, several other stores will still use a technology it continues to say works by using “computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning”.
How is this not basically a scam? It certainly feels that way: if I was sold this ostensibly automated feat of technology, I would feel cheated by Amazon if it was mostly possible because someone was watching a live camera feed and making manual corrections. If the Information’s reporting is correct, only 30% of transactions are as magically automated as Amazon claims. However, Amazon told Gizmodo that only a “small minority” of transactions need human review today — but, then again, Amazon has marketed this whole thing from jump as though it is just computers figuring it all out.
Amazon says it will be replacing Just Walk Out with its smart shopping cart. Just like those from Instacart, it will show personalized ads on a cart’s screen.
In March, a massive amount of AT&T customer data was leaked on a well-known marketplace. The data included extremely sensitive subscriber information, including Social Security Numbers that were apparently decrypted from how they were stored. AT&T initially denied its own systems were breached but, in a statement a couple of weeks later — apparently prompted by Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch — it acknowledged it or “one of its vendors” could be the source.
AT&T also said it was released on the “dark web” but, like, you can just Google the forum where they are available. It is a normal non-Tor website.
Anyway, Om Malik was a customer and expects some of his information is in this leak, and is not impressed with AT&T’s response:
These guys get in touch when you are late with your payment — but not when they can’t do their job. My initial reaction to the news was the all-too-familiar rage, and the all-too-often repeated four-letter words. AT&T wants you to sign up and get free monitoring from one of the three credit bureaus — which have been hacked at some point.
This is no different from what T-Mobile did when it was hacked. The problem with such actions is that it leads to nowhere — placing the entire responsibility on the citizen, who is left dealing with the mess created by large corporations through no fault of their own. […]
I think Malik is right. There is a sort of creeping pessimism that comes with a now-steady gush of data breaches because, it seems, so much has already been disclosed that the leak of another copy of your personal information only makes an already large pile a little bit bigger. But even though bad security practices should not go unpunished, a debilitating penalty for any corporation which fails to protect its records has little effect compared to the misery of each affected person for years.
While Threads in North America feels like everyone is experiencing a gas leak, that is apparently not the case elsewhere — especially Taiwan.
Zeyi Yang wrote, for MIT Technology Review, an excellent explanation of Threads’ popularity, and I think the bloggier summary is a particularly good read:
But more important, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year means there was a lot to talk, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” Wang says. “Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more interaction on Threads than Instagram and Facebook.”
It turns out that even though Meta has tried to position Threads as a less political version of X, what actually underpinned its success in Taiwan was still the universal desire to talk about politics.
Call this a robust counterargument to the way Threads has felt to me for most of the time I have used it. There is, it would seem, a big audience in Taiwan that has found it valuable — so long as Meta does not muck it up.
My dad is an engineer who had already been tinkering with networking gear longer than I’d been alive. Through the company he started, he had designed and deployed all sorts of complex network systems at institutions across the country — everything from gigabit Ethernet for an office building, to inter-city connections over line-of-sight microwave links.
He is the last person on Earth who would say a “magical thinking” phrase like that.
“What?” I uttered, stunned. “The Wi-Fi only works while it’s raining,” he repeated patiently. “It started a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t had a chance to look into it yet.”
Via 500 Mile Email, a blog and newsletter of absurd bug stories, which I found via Andy Baio. Excellent classic stories, and some new ones I had not seen before.
Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage. […]
I hate to keep slagging off Threads on my own or linking to the same, but this piece was too funny not to share. These days, the default feed of suggested posts is full of quote-posts that add nothing to the original. I do not understand what I am doing wrong to train it in this way. Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
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Candice L. Odgers, who is a “developmental psychologist with expertise in adolescent mental health”, reviewed Jonathan Haidt’s new book for Nature:
Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.
If you read the Penguin Random House page, you might get the impression that the New York Times called it an “important new book”. But it is telling that it is a quote from Michelle Goldberg’s generalist opinion column instead of the more critical review by Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, who is a professor of psychology:
Yes, digital absolutism might convince policymakers to change laws and increase regulation. It might be a wake-up call for some parents. But it also might backfire, plunging us into defense mode and blocking our path of discovery toward healthy and empowered digital citizenship.
So that is two psychologists who study the effects of digital technologies on adolescent health have serious qualms with the lack of nuance in Haidt’s writing, but one opinion columnist who thinks it is great. In fairness, Haidt is a social psychologist, but I get the impression from these and other reviews his pop psychology work does not carry a particularly high level of scholarly care.
In a way, Goldberg might be right: this may be a very important book, but for all the wrong reasons. Independent of the book, plenty of U.S. states are passing age verification laws for using social media platforms — there is a federal bill, too — and at least one Canadian party would like to do the same. Haidt has added four hundred pages of justification for ineffective and distracted laws.
Update: Haidt has responded to Odgers’ review.
Pranav Dixit, Engadget:
“WhatsApp is kind of like a media platform and kind of like a messaging platform, but it’s also not quite those things,” Surya Mattu, a researcher at Princeton who runs the university’s Digital Witness Lab, which studies how information flows through WhatsApp, told Engadget. “It has the scale of a social media platform, but it doesn’t have the traditional problems of one because there are no recommendations and no social graph.”
Indeed, WhatsApp’s scale dwarfs nearly every social network and messaging app out there. In 2020, WhatsApp announced it had more than two billion users around the world. It’s bigger than iMessage (1.3 billion users), TikTok (1 billion), Telegram (800 million), Snap (400 million) and Signal (40 million.) It stands head and shoulders above fellow Meta platform Instagram, which captures around 1.4 billion users. The only thing bigger than WhatsApp is Facebook itself, with more than three billion users.
This is a great look at WhatsApp’s history, its ups-and-downs, and some of the unique risks it has.
Via John Gruber:
Anecdotally, I’m seeing more American usage of WhatsApp too. Putting aside the (deeply misguided, IMO) antitrust arguments about iMessage, Apple’s decade ago decision to eschew an iMessage client for Android might be proven to have been a mistake the old-fashioned way: through market forces.
It is not only an anecdote; a January report from Apptopia indicates a growing U.S. user base.
The question of iMessage durability has been in the back of my mind as I have covered years of “blue bubble” lock-in chatter and, if I were a faster writer, it would have been in front of your eyes, too. For all the concern about Apple’s supposed ability to keep people using iPhones because of iMessage, it only affects a handful of countries. Even then, people use multiple clients. While I love the idea of separating the messaging protocol from its client in theory, it is hard to see a story of predatory behaviour.
One-to-one or small group messaging seems to me like a fragile basis for differentiation in its own right, and makes more sense as part of a larger suite of capabilities. WhatsApp seems to be growing that by way of Channels and its business platform. I cannot count the number of businesses I have seen in countries outside Canada and the U.S. that have a WhatsApp chat as the main point of contact — not email, and not a telephone number per se, but messaging through WhatsApp specifically.
Apple arguably has similar ambitions in building up Messages, though it has been slower to react. A few years ago, Apple added business chat through third-party messaging platforms. In the U.S., there is also the Apple Cash feature for peer-to-peer money transfers.
There are two questions about these messaging clients I have been mulling over, both of which were raised in social media mentions to me I cannot seem to find. The first is whether it makes sense to embrace WhatsApp and encourage the growth of a dominant platform run by a truly terrible company. That is a complicated and personal question but, thankfully, there is a Digital Markets Act solution: users in the E.U. will be able to securely message WhatsApp users without needing to use it directly.
The second question is more nuanced: if there is concern about messaging platforms based on their size, surely it makes sense to be just as worried about WhatsApp and iMessage depending on geography. In other words, my somewhat glib response to the Beeper Mini rollercoaster of support — “the most common reasons cited for cross-platform compatibility […] are resolved for everyone if we choose a different app” — ignores how iMessage is, for many people in the U.S., as central as WhatsApp is elsewhere. That is a fair response but, I think, still misses how plentiful messaging clients are. I think I would prefer a completely interoperable world so that my chats are not split between Messages, WhatsApp, Signal, and Instagram — but I also cannot say that it is so bothersome to have options. The market for messaging is not a pie chart, it is a bar chart.
What follows is a short complaint about a couple of things I have written about occasionally over the past couple of years: proprietary chargers and Amazon’s rapid decline in trustworthiness. I am prefacing it with this disclaimer because perhaps you do not want to read a complaint today or, very likely, ever. But maybe you do.
The proprietary charger in question is for a Garmin watch, and I really did hope to find one in just two days because I am meeting up with a traveler. I checked a couple of electronics and sporting goods stores here but because Garmin does not have the presence of, say, Apple, only a handful of places seem to stock their unique cables, and none that I could get to before Sunday afternoon.
But, hey, we have an Amazon Prime account — mostly, it seems, for “Jack Reacher”. Prime is a modern human-powered logistics marvel. If ever there was a time when it would save the day, it would be in unique circumstances like these, right?
Well, only if you have a certain level of comfort for pseudo-branded products of questionable quality. I tried, but I could not find a “Garmin” cable, only a bunch of ones from companies that do not really exist. Do any of them have a warranty? Will the off-brand business be around a couple of months from now? The cables are less expensive, to be sure, almost to a point where there is no need to make a quality product because they can be treated as disposable. I do not like that; it feels rather wasteful. And even if I felt comfortable buying one of these cables for someone else, it would not have arrived in time, so even the Prime promise did not work out.
To be clear, my problem is not that Amazon could not serve me up a cable in a matter of hours. It is that Garmin’s choice to use a proprietary charger created complication, and that the best marketplace solution is so sketchy. Virtually all of these cables were marked “Amazon’s Choice”, which does not mean what it implies.
This is far from a one-time problem with Amazon which, not so long ago, was a perfectly reputable online store. Not any longer. I just recently noticed the Frigidaire water filters I bought with Amazon have typos on the packaging and filters themselves that make me wonder if they are real. I thought I had found an authentic part after dodging obvious knock-offs and plenty of questionable ads, but it seems I may have been conned.
Everything about this feels dirty. I just wanted a charging cable, and I found myself annoyed by one brand’s protectionism and another’s self-destruction. Neither of those things help me in the moment, and they do not make me feel good as a little peek into the broader context they represent.
Supriya Dwivedi, a “senior advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”, in the Toronto Star:
Critics are once again engaging in bad faith tactics and are trying to frame the issue of online harms as a false dichotomy between freedom of expression and clamping down on online harms, including online hate speech. Don’t let them.
[…]
While our government is certainly up for debate on how to improve the bill — including hearing from stakeholders, experts, and everyone in between on which provisions they feel should be fired into the sun — we need to have a conversation that is rooted in reality. Unfortunately, a lot of the commentary on the bill has been light on facts and heavy on hyperbole.
It would be easy to dismiss this as boosting by a person close to a government pushing this bill if not for a cautiously optimistic post I read a month ago from Michael Geist:
My initial post made the case that “this feels like the first Internet regulation bill from this government that is driven primarily by policy rather than implementing the demands of lobby groups or seeking to settle scores with big tech.” Upon reflection, I think that remains true for the provisions focused on the Internet platforms, which are the product of several years of expert panels and public consultations. There is still a need to address Bill C-63 concerns involving enforcement and the powers of the proposed Digital Safety Commission, but Internet regulation to counter identifiable harms remains justified since leaving the issue solely to the police is unlikely to mitigate against the risks of amplification of those harms on social media services.
There are things Geist wants to see changed, clearly, and they are not small. But if someone as careful as Geist is not seeing creeping authoritarianism or a free speech emergency in this bill, it is a good sign everyone should take a deep breath.
Siri has done what no person could for 30 years: Make me stop using an Apple product.
I am giving up on my 8 HomePods/minis out of the sheer frustration of trying to use Siri.
I’ve been in tech for 30 years and this is one of the worst technologies ever and only getting worse
Via Michael Tsai, who has collected recent quotes from other critics.
You could go back one, five, or ten years and find people complaining about pretty much the same problems. The ways it fails me today are pretty much the same as the way it has failed for me for years, and there is no excuse: I speak English with a mild Canadian accent, I do not have a stutter or any other disability, and I am using the latest version of iOS on the newest-model iPhone. Of course, that is not what Siri is tripped-up by — it transcribes me perfectly most of the time. But it delivers utter nonsense.
Sometimes, after I ask Siri to reply to a message, it will ask which contact details to use instead of just sending the message to the phone number or email address from which it came. Just now, I asked Siri how much three tablespoons of butter weighs, and it responded in litres. This is basic shit.
A voice interface is such a difficult interaction model to get right because there is no predictable boundary. A user must trust the computer to interpret and execute each command accurately and, if it fails them once, why would they attempt to do the same thing in the future? They know it does not work.
Sean Sperte, in response to a joke:
This is why Siri’s ineptitude is a branding problem for Apple more than anything else. (I believe it’s also the reason HomePod isn’t a bigger hit.)
To interpolate one of the few good moments from a bad show, Apple has a P.R. problem because it has an actual problem in Siri.
First impressions really matter, but in Siri’s case, it’s over a decade of lived experience. If I were at Apple and believed the company finally had a good voice assistant experience, I’d push for a new brand.
I would not be surprised if Apple used a complete rearchitecting of Siri to change its name.
Something I cannot help but wonder is whether Siri would still be so bad if users could pick something else. That goes for any platform and any product, by the way — what if you could pick Google’s assistant on an Amazon device, or Siri on a Google device? I am not suggesting this is how it ought to be. But what if these voice assistants actually had to compete with each other directly instead of in the context of the products in which they are sold? Would that inspire more rapid development, higher quality, and more confidence from users?
Instead, here we are: Apple may as well give up on Siri as it is currently envisioned. It seems many users do not really trust it. I have given up on it for anything more complicated than setting a timer.
If I ran a website that supported Google-account login, I’d be pretty pissed at how they’re suddenly putting up an obnoxious overlay over my site’s layout.
Why is this not bothering more people? Does anyone give a shit about their websites anymore?
This aggressive dialog has been present since last year and it sucks. It looks horrible, it covers a large part of the page, and it effectively functions as an ad for Google on any third-party website that has implemented its authentication feature. Complete contempt for users.
I blocked these universally with my user stylesheet in Safari, and you can use a similar rule to mine in an ad blocker. StopTheMadness also hides this gross dialog.
Mike Rogoway, Oregon Live:
Oregon became the fourth state to pass a bill giving consumers a legal right to fix their own home electronics Monday with legislation that requires manufacturers provide access to the tools, parts and manuals required to repair their gadgets.
[…]
“We remain very concerned about the risk to consumers imposed by the broad parts-pairing restrictions in this bill,” John Perry, principal secure repair architect for Apple, said at a legislative hearing last month.
While Apple supports consumers’ right to repair their devices, Perry — who works at an Apple office in Beaverton — said the language in Oregon’s bill is too broad. He said it could introduce vulnerabilities to biometric security and battery safety and could potentially increase theft.
Quick note: the bill (PDF) specifically exempts restrictions on parts pairing related to battery safety in paragraph 3(f). Of course, Apple has made the same dire warnings for years in protest of right-to-repair legislation, and it is hard to know how seriously to take these claims. Oregon’s law does impose some new rules about the ways parts pairing can be used which appear to address some gaps in Apple’s repair policies. It was signed into law today.
One thing we do not know yet is how many people are using resources like Apple’s Self Service Repair Store or Google’s Pixel parts store on iFixit. I could not find a press release from either party about how many products have been repaired, how many kits have been sold, or similar celebrations.
A lack of uptake, however, is not a reason to argue about whether laws like these ought to exist. Right-to-repair legislation is imposed as a baseline expectation for how businesses ought to approach products. It should be possible to repair things and, where pairing or calibration are needed, those practices ought to be justified. If they are legitimate, there should be no problem.
Garry Ing, writing for the third issue of the HTML Review:
On my personal websites view source meant being able to adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with. In particular, it’s sense of “transparency” as Clay Shirky wrote in April, 1998, numerating on what makes for “good” software: […]
This is a lovely article, with meaningful presentation; I encourage you to view it on a device which supports hover better than your smartphone browser likely does.
This world is unfortunately becoming lost or, at least, degraded — not because it is no longer possible to view the source of a webpage, but because that source is often inscrutable, even on simple webpages. There are still the familiar building blocks of paragraph tags, blockquotes, and all-purpose divs, but markup is oftentimes dense and littered with utility CSS classes. I am not dumping on new ways of doing things just because they are unclear to me; I am dumping on them because they are unclear for everyone. Markup is structure visible to all.
Apple has announced WWDC 2024 for June 10, with a rumoured focus on A.I. in operating system updates, including VisionOS. But fear not: 6 (June) + 10 + 2 (A.I.) = iOS 18 confirmed.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo.
[…]
Later, according to the court documents, Facebook expanded the program to Amazon and YouTube.
It is worth underscoring that this happened between 2016 and when Meta shut down Onavo in 2019. Meta — then Facebook — was not a small company at this time. Yet what it was doing with Onavo is so unethical it feels criminal: one of the world’s biggest corporations spying on millions of users through something it presented as a VPN for their privacy and security.
Lora Kolodny, CNBC:
Judge Charles Breyer in the Northern District of California wrote in his ruling that while X claimed the case was about breach of contract and unlawful data scraping, it was clearly about speech.
[…]
Musk is pursuing similar cases against other groups.
In one instance, X has sued an Israeli web data collection company called Bright Data over its allegedly unauthorized scraping of data from its social media platform. And in Texas, X sued Media Matters for America and one of its staff members over an investigative report the watchdog published titled, “As Musk endorses antisemitic conspiracy theory, X has been placing ads for Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to pro-Nazi content.”
I briefly mentioned this lawsuit when it was filed in July but, as it was one of several similar cases — as noted above — I have found it difficult to keep track.
The judge’s direct response (PDF) is quite something to read. This is from page 40–41:
Here, CCDH is alleged to have used Twitter’s own search tool to collect 9,615 public tweets from ten Twitter users, […] It is not plausible that this small-scale, non-commercial scraping would prompt X Corp. to divert “dozens, if not over a hundred personnel hours across disciplines,” […] of resources toward the repair of X Corp.’s systems. […]
It is clear to the Court that if X Corp. was indeed motived to spend money in response to CCDH’s scraping in 2023, it was not because of the harm such scraping posed to the X platform, but because of the harm it posed to X Corp.’s image. […]
It goes on like this: paragraph after paragraph dismantling Twitter’s nonsense.
Semafor published in a new format it calls Signals — sponsored by Microsoft, though I am earnestly sure no editorial lines were crossed — aggregated commentary about the U.S. iPhone antitrust case:
If the government wins the suit, “the walls of Apple’s walled garden will be partially torn down,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Peter Coy, meaning its suite of products will be “more like a public utility,” available to its rivals to use. “That seems to me like stretching what antitrust law is for,” Coy wrote. Tech policy expert Adam Kovacevich agreed, writing on Medium that people have long gone back and forth between iPhones and Android devices. “People vote with their pocketbooks,” Kovacevich said. “Why should the government force iPhones to look more like Androids?”
Many argue that this is an issue of consumer choice, and the government shouldn’t intervene to help companies such as Samsung gain a better footing in the market. The Consumer Choice Center’s media director put it this way: “Imagine the classroom slacker making the case to the teacher that the straight-A student in the front of the class is being anti-competitive by not sharing their lecture notes with them.”
The Kovacevich article this links to is the same one I wrote about over the weekend. His name caught my eye, but not nearly as much as the way he is described: as a “tech policy expert”. That is not wrong, but it is incomplete. He is the CEO of the Chamber of Progress, an organization that lobbies for policies favourable to the large technology companies that fund it.
It also seems unfair to attribute the latter quote to the Consumer Choice Center without describing what it represents — though I suppose its name makes it pretty obvious. It positions itself at the centre of “the global grassroots movement for consumer choice”, and you do not need the most finely tuned bullshit detector to be suspicious of the “grassroots” nature of an organization promoting the general concept of having lots of stuff to buy.
Indeed, the Center acknowledges being funded by a wide variety of industries, including “energy” — read: petroleum — nicotine, and “digital”. According to tax documents, it pulled in over $4 million in 2022. It shares its leadership with another organization, Consumer Choice Education. It brought in $1.5 million in 2022, over half of which came from the Atlas Network, a network of libertarian think tanks that counts among its supporters petroleum companies and the billionaire Koch brothers. The ostensibly people-centred Center just promoting the rights of consumers is, very obviously, supported by corporations either directly or via other pro-business organizations that also get their funding either directly from corporations or via other — oh, you understand how this works.
None of that inherently invalidates the claims made by either Kovacevich or Stephen Kent for the Consumer Choice Center, but I fault Semafor for the lack of context for either quote. Both people surely believe what they wrote. But organizations that promote the interests of big business exist to provide apparently independent supporting voices because it is more palatable than those companies making self-interested arguments.
The U.S. antitrust case against Apple was not a closely guarded secret. Stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg spoiled not just the general timing of the case, but its contours as well. That gave Adam Kovacevich, of Chamber of Progress, the confidence to dispute the government’s arguments before the lawsuit was filed — a risky choice, I think.
Kovacevich is the CEO and co-founder of Chamber of Progress, a nominally progressive lobbying organization for large technology companies. It was launched in 2021, and is funded by corporations you know like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Uber; Kovacevich used to work on public policy at Google. The Chamber uses its support of progressive causes like voter rights and universal health care as cover for its main activity, which is reflecting the priorities of its funders. The Chamber routinely argues on its blog and in legal filings in defence of big business as usual.
Kovacevich begins his attempt at front-running the government’s arguments by transforming a possibility into an definite:
This suit has been rumored for months, so we have a good idea of what it will include. It will likely force iPhones to work more like Android devices.
If you’re among the millions of Americans who have purchased an iPhone because of integrated features like Find My Phone, Apple Pay, iMessage, or integration with Airpods and Apple Watch, you better hope that this lawsuit fails.
Because if it succeeds, there will no longer be any difference between your iPhone and an Android device.
This is flagrantly untrue. Maybe you are willing to cut Kovacevich some slack because this article was written before the complaint was filed, but I am not, because Kovacevich could have just waited one extra day to see if he was right. But, even on Wednesday, it would have been outside reasonable grounds to think the case would pitch enough stuff that, if successful, would remove “any difference between” iPhones and Android phones. Even the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, for how comprehensive it is, will not have that result.
In a press release published after the suit was filed — otherwise known as the correct time to react to something: after it has happened — Kovacevich did pull back to a more cautious position of saying it “would make iPhones more like Androids”, emphasis mine. But that is so vague, even in its full context of “forc[ing] Apple to open up its software and hardware”, it is almost meaningless. Is a private API for the NFC chip really part of what makes an iPhone so different from an Android phone? That seems like a pretty flimsy argument when there is so much about iOS that is actually meaningfully different from Android and not for reasons hostile to competition.
Kovacevich:
This lawsuit wasn’t spurred by consumer or voter complaints. Instead, companies like Tile, Beeper, Spotify, Match Group (a former client of DOJ Antitrust Chief Jonathan Kanter), banks, and payment apps have all spent months pushing the DOJ to bring this lawsuit. They would be the largest beneficiaries of the lawsuit.
Whether Americans’ complaints “spurred” the Department of Justice to act is a good question, but it is untrue to argue there have been no complaints. Most people in the U.S. have, for years, responded favourably to polls asking if they support regulating the largest technology firms, though they have not ranked it as a top priority. Even the Chamber of Progress’ own polling found support for regulations, somewhat undermined by the specific examples of consequences.
It is probably true that business complaints were the primary drivers of the DoJ’s action, though. An annotation I wrote for one part about payment apps in my copy of the complaint reads “sounds like a bank wrote this”. But protesting this on the grounds of corporate involvement is pretty rich coming from the guy who runs a lobbying firm arguing for the positions of even bigger corporations. Are we really supposed to be mad if Tile benefits?
Kovacevich:
More than 135 million Americans own an iPhone. And for many of them, the ease and simplicity of iPhone’s integrated experience is why they purchased the device in the first place.
I have owned Tile tracking devices. Apple’s AirTags and Find My Phone work much better.
I have owned Android Watches. But the connection between my Apple Watch and my iPhone is seamless.
When I pop in my AirPods, my iPhone recognizes them right away. And iMessage just works across my phone, computer, and iPad.
When I purchase an app on my phone, it’s automatically available on my iPad too.
Despite years of hype over “mobile payments,” I never even considered leaving my traditional wallet at home until I started using Apple Pay.
Why, specifically, are these third-party products less capable on an iPhone compared to first-party options, Adam?
More to the point, what is the goal here? The government’s position is not that Apple should reduce the capabilities of its own products, but that Apple should not so aggressively restrict third-party capabilities. What if other smartwatches or tracking devices or headphones worked better with iPhones? Maybe not entirely to Apple’s first-party standards but, you know, better. That sounds like a more preferable situation than one in which consumers are compelled to remain within the confines of first-party products allegedly because of deliberate attempts to avoid competition.
Kovacevich:
I understand fully why Tile, Beeper, and Match Group have agitated for this lawsuit. It would surely benefit them. But US competition law is designed to help consumers, not competitors. And this suit will force Apple to break the seamless experience that millions of customers have chosen.
That is one perspective on U.S. competition law. But it is not an argument shared by everybody, and it is disingenuous to claim that is how the law has been “designed” so much has how it has been shaped since the 1970s.
The argument in favour of also balancing a desire for competition has been criticized by lobbyists for large technology firms, but it is a discussion worth having: what problems are created by the mere existence of uniquely large businesses? The Chamber and the CCIA say their size is what lets them offer things like comprehensive services and free shipping, which consumers like and, therefore, there is no need to intervene. But are there negative outcomes, too, especially if smaller businesses struggle to compete due to those apparently inherent advantages of being big? That is a core question of newer perspectives on antitrust.
Kovacevich then takes on the question of whether the iPhone has “market power” or “monopoly power”, which are different things that he seems to conflate. The title of this section is “Courts Have Found that iOS Doesn’t have Market Power”, and I wanted to focus on this:
Furthermore, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found in the Epic v. Apple case that:
Apple’s market share is below the general ranges of where courts found monopoly power under Section 2…[the] Court cannot conclude that Apple’s market power reaches the status of monopoly power in the mobile gaming market.
I am always suspicious when I see mashed-together quotes like these. Indeed, the first part of the quote comes from two pages before the second. While it was fair to eliminate some of the discussion and assessment of the market, this mashup eliminates significant context from before and after.
For background, on page 87, the judge notes that this is a calculation of the global mobile gaming market, of which Apple’s share is apparently nearly 60% by dollar value despite the iPhone’s 16% share of global devices. Whether this global share will be relevant to the 2024 trial is a question for the courts.
Immediately before the first part of that mashup quotation, the judge writes on page 137:
[…] That Apple has more than a majority in a mostly duopolistic, and otherwise highly concentrated, market indicates that Apple has considerable market power.
So to Kovacevich’s section title — “Courts Have Found that iOS Doesn’t have Market Power” — I would note that courts have also found iOS does have market power. And here is what the judge wrote immediately following the second part of that mashed-up quote, as it appears on page 139:
That said, the evidence does suggest that Apple is near the precipice of substantial market power, or monopoly power, with its considerable market share. Apple is only saved by the fact that its share is not higher, that competitors from related submarkets are making inroads into the mobile gaming submarket, and, perhaps, because plaintiff did not focus on this topic.
The impression you might get if you read Kovacevich’s summary is that Apple is definitely not a monopoly. But the actual argument made by the judge in this case is that if Apple’s share grows only a little more, it may be have a monopoly position.
Kovacevich wraps by comparing the duopoly of device options to Disneyland and Yosemite National Park:
It’s great for consumers that we have these two alternative models of mobile devices — one closed and integrated, one open and flexible. People vote with their pocketbooks — and have switched back and forth between Androids and iPhones.
So why should the government force iPhones to look more like Androids?
I enjoy visiting the safe, sanitized environment of Disneyland and the wild of Yosemite National Park. But I would hate to see the government force Disneyland to look more like Yosemite (or vice versa).
Tourist attractions are a poor analogy for owning a smartphone. A better one, if you want an analogy, is something like a really powerful company town compared to a normal city. Everything you can buy and do is filtered through a paternalistic owner, there are seemingly arbitrary rules, and despite all the bureaucracy, it is unwise for businesses to ignore setting up shop there because its residents seem to spend more money.
People make all kinds of trade-offs when they buy something as complex and convergent as a smartphone, and it is difficult to know how much of that is a fair vote with their wallet and how much of it is a side effect of the platform owner’s impositions.
We saw this play out before the iPhone 6 was introduced. Apple still sold plenty of iPhones even though its models had smaller displays than competing products, and it was unclear whether people were buying iPhones because they were small or in spite of their size. The still-unbeaten unit sales of the iPhone 6 models shows lots of people wanted a bigger iPhone. Some of those buyers formerly used an Android phone, but others were existing iPhone customers who bought previous models even though they wished they could be bigger. Still others were like me: people who still bought an iPhone because of other factors, even though they were now — and remain — too big.
Questions like these are far too complicated to simplify into the catchy but wrong claim that “government [will] force iPhones to look more like Androids”. There are undoubtably some — many, probably — who really like the way their iPhone works today. But I know people who have other smartwatches who wish they worked better with their iPhone. There are iPhone features which I bet would work better if Apple had meaningful competition within its own platform.
That lots of people buy iPhones is not inherently a vote of confidence in each detail of the entire package. If some of those things changed a little bit — the U.S. government’s suit is not a massive overhaul of the way the iPhone works — I doubt people would stop liking or trusting the product.
Whether they will like or trust their bank’s attempt at a wallet app is another discussion entirely.
In January, Semafor’s Max Tani obtained a memo from Anna Wintour announcing Pitchfork would become part of GQ. Though Wintour emphasized “our coverage of music can continue to thrive within” Condé Nast, it is hard not to see this as the beginning of an ending for the version of Pitchfork many of us grew up with.
Casey Newton, of Platformer, argued one of the main reasons Pitchfork lost relevance is because of streaming services:
The most important change arrived in 2006, when Spotify was born. (It arrived in the United States five years later.) Spotify was Napster, but legal: a celestial jukebox that let you listen to almost anything you could imagine, on demand and for pennies a day.
Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?
It’s hard to overstate what a challenge this posed to music criticism. As consumers of music, we came to Pitchfork to ask one question — is this worth listening to? — and got an entire education in return. But with the arrival of streaming music that question lost its meaning, and suddenly we had fewer and fewer reasons to seek out criticism.
I have been ruminating on this conclusion for two months and I think I have figured out why it makes me uneasy: the problem, as it were, is not the delivery system but how it is used. Trent Reznor, in an interview with Rick Rubin, is right in saying “Spotify’s homepage [feels] like I’m at the mall walking past the same shit I would see the billboards of going down Sunset Boulevard”; Newton is right in arguing it commoditized music and transformed it to be “consumed at the point of curation”.
Frank Rojas, New York Times:
Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?
[…]
So who is responsible for the peculiar titles? Spotify users who have been amused by these thrice-daily servings of word salad might be surprised — or, just as likely, not — to learn that the playlist names are ginned up by A.I.
If your music listening experience is mostly driven by playlists and suggestions, you might be less interested in reviewers and critics. That is not a denigration of how anyone listens to music, mind you — I am not a prescriptivist about this kind of stuff. You should experience art in the way you choose.
But streaming music is ultimately just a catalogue into which anyone can dive. It reduces the bar to entry and, on the other side of the same coin, reduces the cost of exiting. If you do not like an album, there is not a $20 sunk cost compelling you to keep going. But you also do not need to spend $20 to experiment with something you are unsure if you will like. This was always the selling point of high quality piracy and it continues to be the thing that makes streaming alluring — if you want it to be. Critics still exist, even if Pitchfork seems to have lost its relevance, and they can help you navigate the overwhelming amount of new music released each week.
Elizabeth Lopatto, of the Verge, wrote a great profile of the site’s rise and fall. This part, in particular, was brutal to read:
What’s more, Condé has long seemed confused about the difference between traffic and a loyal audience. Pitchfork’s homepage attracts far more visitors than those of GQ or Vogue, three people familiar with Condé’s traffic told me. As referrals from social media and Google decline, a loyal audience is more important than ever — but only if you’re smart enough to cultivate one. Anna Wintour, global chief content officer of Condé Nast, doesn’t care about music and doesn’t understand the internet, two former Pitchfork staffers told me. She didn’t even take her sunglasses off when she fired Pitchfork’s employees.
It probably does not help that, at some point over the past year, Pitchfork moved the reviews on its homepage to below a section of fairly generic music news.
For what it is worth, I was never a huge Pitchfork reader, but I appreciate the mark its critics left. Its elevation of independent music has been a uniquely important contribution to my life, and many of those highly rated albums soundtracked my early-to-mid 2000s. It is a shame it appears to be on its way out.
Mayank Parmar, Windows Latest:
While using Google Chrome, I encountered a Bing pop-up on the right side of the browser. For a moment, I thought Chrome was infected with malware, but it turned out to be a new Microsoft campaign.
In a statement to Windows Latest, Microsoft confirmed the company is testing a “one-time” notification that encourages people to use Bing as a default search in Google Chrome. The pop-up also advertises Bing’s free access to ChatGPT-4, where users can get “hundreds of daily chat turns with Bing AI”.
Speaking of things first-party platform vendors can do, this is an ad delivered by Windows within Chrome. Many things have changed since that antitrust trial, but something that remains the same is the contempt for users shown by corporate attempts to grab market share.
John Heilemann, for Wired in November 2000, wrote a sprawling play-by-play of Microsoft’s antitrust trial. There is an awful lot here to digest — close to fifty thousand words — and much of it rhymes with Apple’s situation, as David Piece put it.
This, though, is a core issue in both cases:
Monopoly or no, Windows was unquestionably an enormous asset for Microsoft. (“An asset of the shareholders of Microsoft,” as Gates put it.) And it was one over which the company had claimed total freedom — the freedom to add a ham sandwich, for instance. Was there any limit to how far he was willing to press the advantage of owning the dominant operating system?
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘advantage,'” he said, inspiring in me the brief fantasy that I was David Boies. “It is one of the more proven things that just because we put something in the operating system doesn’t mean people will use it,” Gates went on, citing the early, failed versions of IE, as well as the MSN client software. “Putting new features in the OS is a very, very good thing. Some of those features will end up being used heavily and some won’t. All you have to do is look at the growth of the software industry to say this is an industry that’s delivering for consumers in a fantastic way. So, yes, innovation is OK.”
Gates hadn’t answered the question, so I asked it again, this time more precisely: “Is there any limit to what you regard as appropriate to put into the operating system?”
In other words, how much is it okay for a first party to advantage themselves over third parties? If there is a line, where should it be, and who should establish it? There is obviously deep resistance to government intervention among the industry and its commentators, but there is also little incentive for operating system vendors to restrain themselves from prioritizing their own products and services. Gates, at this time, could not articulate any reason why Microsoft should not follow any competitive path it chose, even if that meant doing things third-party developers could not.
This is an obviously daunting article but, if it makes you feel any better, it is illustrated with pictures of Microsoft executives in ’90s corporate chic.
While the U.S. Department of Justice has not yet issued its press release, its complaint has been filed. Attorneys General from fifteen states and Washington D.C. have co-signed.
Update: The title and second sentence have been changed to recognize that Washington D.C. is not, in fact, a state. This Canadian says sorry.
Alfred Ng, Politico:
The data-privacy bill passed Wednesday, the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act, H.R. 7520, is highly targeted: It prevents any companies considered data brokers — third-party buyers and sellers of personal information — from selling that information to China, Russia or other “foreign adversaries.”
Though far narrower than previous bills, it would establish a precedent as the first federal law to govern data privacy in years.
Unlike the TikTok bill, this is meaningful privacy legislation for people in the United States — and it passed without a single negative vote. It is also likely to make its way to a Senate vote, according to Ng. It is similar to the executive order signed last month and therefore has similar caveats. Data brokers can still sell U.S. data to another broker in any non-adversarial country, for example, and it could be re-sold from there.
This may not be stellar legislation which limits the activity of data brokers within the U.S. or restricts the kind of mass data collection which permits these kinds of data sales, but it is progress.
Adam Engst, TidBits:
Longtime Mac users often get caught up in looking at the amount of free space reported by the Finder. We’ll check the storage numbers shown in a Get Info dialog, delete something, and check again. Don’t waste your time! Space management on the Mac is now largely indeterminate thanks to APFS, Time Machine snapshots, purgeable space, and more, as Howard Oakley explains. These technologies render the Finder-reported number unreliable at any given point in time. Even after you empty the Trash, it may take macOS several hours or more to update its free space reports. Restarting may or may not help trigger a recalculation.
Instead of stressing about exact numbers, I want to offer you a set of steps that will clear space quickly and easily on most Macs. Apple has advice here, and it’s not wrong, but it’s far from comprehensive. macOS also provides tools to help reduce unneeded drive usage at System Settings > General > Storage. Some are worthwhile; others do little or are incomplete. I’ll cover the helpful ones below.
Via Michael Tsai:
Removing local copies of iCloud Drive files is not great because then they are no longer backed up. You can do this in a pinch, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term plan.
I would also be reluctant to delete local copies of iCloud-stored files, either automatically or manually, especially given a bug affecting file versions in the latest release of MacOS Sonoma in certain conditions.
In light of the way APFS and “purgeable” stored files work, Engst is right that it is better to focus on an overall picture of a Mac’s drive rather than specific numbers. I do not know that I will ever get used to the mismatch between what is reported in Finder and the numbers in Disk Utility, but I guess that is just how things will be.
Anyway, I recently wanted to clear up some space on my iMac, and here are two things that worked and one which, for many, will not:
For whatever reason, when iTunes was replaced with Music, MacOS did not remove the now-irrelevant cached Apple Music files from iTunes. Deleting that folder freed up 38 GB of space.
While my photo library is stored on an external disk in Photos, I export selected RAW files to a folder on my local disk and edit those ones in Lightroom. It turns out those files are able to be losslessly compressed through a Lightroom feature called “Update DNG Previews & Metadata”. It is poorly documented and ambiguously named, but running it on my library resulted in a 40% disk space savings — huge, across thousands of photos.
The one thing which did not work for me — and this will depend on your specific situation — was sorting applications by size and, in theory, removing the largest unused ones. The problem I have is that virtually all of those really big applications are the ones I need for work. They are typically made by massive and dominant vendors like Adobe, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft, and none of them respect you or your disk space.
Google Chrome retains old versions in its application file. Microsoft’s OneDrive client for MacOS is 1.2 GB, and all the files for Cisco’s WebEx client occupy around 2 GB, for a file transfer application and a video calling app, respectively. Installing just one of the core Microsoft 365 applications, like Word, will install about 9 GB of shared frameworks.
It feels like users should simultaneously not need to think about disk space and be able to have more direct command over what is stored on it. But there are enough reporting discrepancies, long-expired caches, and uncivil developers making products which are core to many users’ careers to make it seem like we control far less than we would like to believe.
Update: I updated the description of the iCloud bug in Sonoma based on Adam Engst’s feedback to reduce its apparent severity.
Foo Yun Chee, Reuters:
Apple on Monday fended off criticism that it has not done enough to open up its closed eco-system as required under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, saying it has complied with the landmark legislation.
[…]
The company told apps developers, business users and rivals at a day-long hearing organised by the European Commission that it has redesigned its systems to comply with the DMA.
Dan Moren, Six Colors:
During the workshop, [Riley] Testut used his time to ask about the Core Technology Fee. Under Apple’s new business terms in Europe (required for apps looking to be distributed via non-Apple app marketplaces or the web), there’s a €0.50 fee per app install over the first million. Testut rightly points out that a free app, such as the one he made in high school, that becomes popular could easily accrue enough costs to ruin a young developer’s life.
Apple VP of Legal Kyle Andeer responded sympathetically, saying that the company is continuing to try and find a good solution, and to “stay tuned.”
Even with this softened tone, I am certain the Core Technology Fee is just about the last thing Apple will meaningfully relax due to either regulatory pressure or developer outcry. Still, a flash of hope, and something to check in on later.
Other, similar compliance workshops are coming up all week long. Meta’s begins just a few hours from the time I am writing this.
Update: Steve Troughton-Smith ran the hearing through MacWhisper to create an unofficial transcript. It may not be wholly accurate but it is on my reading list anyhow.
In 2022, the Biden administration was sued by two Attorneys General because it said the government had overstepped in opining on the moderation of social media platforms. A narrowed version of that case — after removing incidents from before the Biden administration existed — made its way to oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States today.
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate:
What happens when a lawless judge and a terrible appeals court embrace the dopiest First Amendment claim you’ve ever heard out of pure spite toward a Democratic president? That would be Murthy v. Missouri, a brain-meltingly dumb case that the Supreme Court was unfortunate enough to hear oral arguments in on Monday. Murthy poses a question so asinine that to ask it is to answer it: Can government officials encourage social media companies to moderate certain content that they deem harmful—most importantly, disinformation about COVID-19 in the middle of the pandemic?
Yes, of course they can […]
There is some kind of cosmic poetry at play landing this case in the spotlight less than a week after the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill which, if passed by the Senate and signed into law, would create the ability to force an application’s divestiture or ban it. The two circumstances look like funhouse mirror versions of each other. In the case of TikTok — the current target of the bill passed by the House — the problem lawmakers have is a “foreign adversary” seems to be leaning on the company — a situation the U.S. would like to rectify by giving it the power to lean on the company. In Murthy, a U.S. state is arguing the U.S. government should not be able to communicate with social media companies about policy at all because doing so is inherently coercive.
But the resolution of the two cases could be in seemingly opposing decisions. In Murthy, it seems likely the court will side with the Biden administration — see the analyses from Amy L. Howe and Mike Masnick. But in the TikTok bill, lawmakers are clamouring to give the government the power to suppress an app and its speech, and arguing that will be a tall order. I have been writing more about the latter as it seems it is suddenly locally relevant.
Even for a Mac user who prides themselves on refined taste in typography, one would be excused for missing the rather buried Typography palette in MacOS. It is available in any application that supports the Fonts selector and allows you to enable all manner of features, depending on what the specific font file permits. You can set which ligatures are supported, toggle specific alternate characters, and enable old-style numbers which flow more nicely in body text.
For a long time, this palette was a dry list of checkboxes and disclosure triangles. A user would need to first know this palette exists, and then know what each option did. But, in a recent version of MacOS, the palette has been updated with icons that more clearly display what will change. Depending on the font file in question, there are many different options available, and the numerically differentiated “stylistic sets” have never been clear. This is much nicer.
I have not seen this documented anywhere and I do not remember it launching with MacOS Sonoma. I am running MacOS 14.3.1 as of writing. I have not seen anything relevant in Howard Oakley’s documentation. Regardless of when it was updated, it is a very nice change that helps everyone understand typography a little better. Now, if only Pages defaulted to old-style figures when writing paragraph-level text.
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine. There was no roadmap to predict the course of its evolution, it was a captivating odyssey filled with unforeseen opportunities and challenges. Underlying its whole infrastructure was the intention to allow for collaboration, foster compassion and generate creativity — what I term the 3 C’s. It was to be a tool to empower humanity. The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise — the web was decentralised with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value. Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them. […]
Ed Zitron, in a post provocatively titled “Are We Watching The Internet Die?”:
Right now, the internet is controlled by a few distinct platforms, each one intent on interrupting the exploratory and creative forces that made the web great. I believe that their goal is to intrude on our ability to browse the internet, to further obfuscate the source of information while paying the platforms for content that their users make for free. Their eventual goal, in my mind, is to remove as much interaction with the larger internet as possible, summarizing and regurgitating as much as they can so that they can control and monetize the results as much as possible.
There are some things in Zitron’s post which one could quibble over — too much handwaving around algorithms and generative A.I., for example, and Zitron conflates the web and the internet. But both these pieces are related and worth your time.
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During a White House press briefing on March 12, CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe asked press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if photos of the president or other members of the White House are ever digitally altered. Jean-Pierre laughed and asked, in response, “why would we digitally alter photos? Are you comparing us to what’s going on in the U.K.?” O’Keefe said he was just doing due diligence. Jean-Pierre said, regarding digital photo manipulation, “that is not something that we do here”.
It is unclear to me whether Jean-Pierre was specifically declining the kind of multi-frame stacking apparent in the photo of the Princess of Wales and her children, or digital alterations more broadly. But it got me thinking — there is a strain of good-faith question to be asked here: are public bodies meeting the standards of editorial photography?
Well, first, it depends on which standards one refers to. There are many — the BBC has its own, as does NPR, the New York Times, and the National Press Photographers Association. Oddly, I could not find comparable documentation for the expectations of the official White House photographer. But it is the standards of the Associated Press which are the subject of the Princess of Wales photo debacle, and they are both representative and comprehensive:
Minor adjustments to photos are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, elimination of dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints and normal toning and color adjustments. These should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph. Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of “red eye” from photographs is not permissible.
If I can summarize these rules: changes should minimize the influence of the camera on how the scene was captured, and represent the scene as true to how it would be seen in real life. Oh, and photographers cannot remove red eye. Those are the standards I am expecting from the White House photographer to claim they do not digitally “alter” photos.
Happily, we can find out if those expectations are met even from some JPEG exports. Images edited using Adobe Lightroom carry metadata describing the edits made in surprising detail, and you can view that data using Photoshop or ExifTool. I opened a heavily manipulated photo of my own — the JPEG, not the original RAW file — and found in its metadata a record of colour and light correction, adjustment masks, perspective changes, and data about how much I healed and cloned. It was a lot and for clarification, that photo would not be acceptable by editorial standards.
To find out what was done by the White House, I downloaded the original-sized JPEG copies of many images from the Flickr accounts of the last three U.S. presidents. Then I examined the metadata. Even though O’Keefe’s question pertained specifically to the president, vice president, and other people in the White House, I broadened my search to include any photo. Surely all photos should meet editorial standards. I narrowed my attention to the current administration and the previous one because the Obama administration covered two terms, and that is a lot of pictures to go through.
We will start with an easy one. Remember that picture from the Osama Bin Laden raid? It is obviously manipulated and it says so right there in the description: “a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured”. I think most people would believe that is a fair alteration.
But the image’s metadata reveals several additional spot exposure adjustments throughout the image. I am guessing some people in the back were probably under-exposed in the original.
This kind of exposure adjustment is acceptable by editorial standards — it is the digital version of dodging and burning. It is also pretty standard across administrations. A more stylized version was used during the Trump administration on pictures like this one to make some areas more indigo, and the Biden administration edited parts of this picture to make the lights bluer.
All administrations have turned some colour pictures greyscale, and have occasionally overdone it. The Trump administration increased the contrast and crushed the black levels in parts of this photo, and I wonder if that would be up to press standards.
There are lots more images across all three accounts which have gradient adjustments, vignettes, and other stylistic changes. These are all digital alterations to photos which are, at most, aesthetic choices that do not meaningfully change the scene or the way the image is interpreted.
But I also found images which had more than those simple adjustments. The Biden administration published a photo of a lone officer in the smoke of a nineteen-gun salute. Its metadata indicates the healing brush tool was used in a few places (line breaks added to fit better inline):
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I am not sure exactly what was removed from the image, but there appears to be enough information here to indicate where the healing brush was used. Unfortunately, I cannot find any documentation about how to read these tags. (My guess is that these are percent coordinates and that 0,0 is the upper-left corner.) If all that was removed is lens or sensor crud, it would probably be acceptable. But if objects were removed, it would not meet editorial standards.
The Trump administration also has photos that have been retouched (line breaks added to fit better inline):
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Even though there are lots more edits to this photo, it seems plausible they were made to remove lens or sensor dust made more obvious by the heavy use of the dehaze (+14), contrast (+50), and clarity (+2) adjustments.
For what it is worth, this does not seem like a scandal to me — at least, not unless it can be shown edits to White House photos were made to alter what was actually in the frame. But, to review: does the White House digitally alter images? Yes, at least a little. Does the White House conform to accepted editorial standards? I am not sure. Should it? In my view, yes, always — and so should the products of any government photographer. Has the White House done anything remotely close to that Princess of Wales image? Not that I have seen. Should I stop writing this as a series of rhetorical questions? Oh, hell, yes.
Kashmir Hill, New York Times:
But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened. Modern cars are internet-enabled, allowing access to services like navigation, roadside assistance and car apps that drivers can connect to their vehicles to locate them or unlock them remotely. In recent years, automakers, including G.M., Honda, Kia and Hyundai, have started offering optional features in their connected-car apps that rate people’s driving. Some drivers may not realize that, if they turn on these features, the car companies then give information about how they drive to data brokers like LexisNexis.
[…]
After LexisNexis and Verisk get data from consumers’ cars, they sell information about how people are driving to insurance companies. […]
If this subject feels familiar to you, you may have read Mozilla’s September report about mass data collection. At the time, I wrote that it was possible a car’s privacy policy is suggesting a greater amount of data collection than is actually occurring. (As an aside, how messed up is it that a car has a privacy policy?) This is something I felt compelled to note, as one of the most circulated disclaimers was Nissan’s permission to collect drivers’ “sexual activity” and “genetic information”, something Mozilla noted was possibly boilerplate stuff. There was lots else in Mozilla’s report I found credible, but this clause in particular read to me like a standard cover-your-ass contract thing — perhaps a template that a law office would keep on hand. While it is not impossible Nissan could, somehow, inadvertently collect this kind of information, it seems unlikely it is actually trying to do so. Why would Nissan want it in the first place?
What Hill’s investigation found is more plausible and understandable — not only because Hill has evidence, but also because everybody involved has a clear financial incentive. Insurance companies can use this information to fiddle with their rates or entirely decline to serve someone. Data brokers and automakers each get paid. Car dealers also get financial bonuses for signing people up — perhaps without their full knowledge.
There is also a mechanism for collecting this information: the car itself knows how you accelerate, brake, and how fast you drive. A pathway this obvious was not present in the Nissan example.
If drivers were fully aware of how their behaviour behind the wheel was disclosed and there were adequate privacy laws protecting its use solely for insurance providers, I think that would be a fair trade off. I would welcome my insurance provider virtually riding along; my one redeeming quality is that I drive like a saint. But this arrangement with data brokers under the mask of driver aides is skeezy in all the ways this same sort of thing appears everywhere. Data is valuable and there are way too many avenues to quietly monetize it.
Update: General Motors has apparently stopped sharing OnStar data with LexisNexis and Verisk.
Jason Snell, Macworld:
And now we can fully see Apple’s strategy of incremental compliance, brought into action: The company announced the minimum possible and then waited to be told what else it needed to do. Now it will begin modifying those policies, as required, in order to satisfy regulators while still doing the minimum required of it, presumably hoping that it won’t get nudged by the regulators all that often.
Expect to see the same kind of settling and negotiation everywhere, from third-party app distribution to the European Commission’s enforcement, over the span of years. It will all be messy — and that is the process working as intended.
Sarah Perez, in her Small Screens newsletter (Update: Perez lost her home and possessions in a fire. Thankfully, all occupants escaped. You can donate to the fundraiser at GoFundMe if you are able.):
What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to think that IAP [in-app purchases] can stand up to the competition: app developers’ websites.
In reality, Apple’s IAP is the most natural and easiest way to buy things on the iPhone, whether that’s virtual goods or currencies in games, subscriptions to favorite apps, paid downloads, micropurchases, and more. You simply double-tap a button and look at your phone to make a transaction. It’s incredibly simple, fast, and relatively painless. (Except when you cave and purchase boosters to pass that tough level in Candy Crush, of course. That’s painful.)
IAP is arguably the best way to buy things on iPhone and gives Apple a huge competitive advantage. It could stand up to competition, but Apple is behaving as if it could not.
Message from a DF reader:
I came across an app that’s getting away with directly linking to a website to start a subscription instead of IAP. It’s a straightforward violation of App Store rules in the US. If you look at reviews, a lot of people complain about fraudulent charges and not being able to cancel. But apparently Apple hasn’t stopped them yet.
[…]
I don’t think DealMachine is a scam. Stripe is as legit as it gets. But when you handle payments on your own, you handle refunds and subscription cancellations on your own too. Renewal reminders too. […]
A few things can be true:
Apple’s in-app purchasing system is a particularly nice way to buy digital goods and manage subscriptions.
Apple requires most developers to use in-app purchases for many types of transaction. It does not compete independently in the market of digital payment systems. This is probably in part because Apple wants a consistent experience in third-party apps. But its 15–30% commission cannot be ignored, and Apple’s mandate implies little faith in IAP’s niceness and familiarity to convince developers to use it.
Easy cancellation of subscriptions can be the domain of consumer protection authorities if you want it to be. You can just pass a law. This sort of stuff is a political slam dunk across the spectrum, except for weird libertarians. It is possible to just require things to be better for everybody regardless of what they bought or how they bought it.
In November, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a revised version (PDF) of its case against Amazon with some notable redactions removed or adjusted. There is much to learn in this newer version which I have inexplicably ignored for four months. For example, paragraph 39 originally read (PDF):
Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit despite Amazon’s extensive efforts to impede the government’s investigation and hide information about its internal operations. Amazon executives systematically and intentionally [long redacted string] of the Signal messaging app. Amazon prejudicially [another long redacted string] despite Plaintiffs’ instructing Amazon not to do so.
In the revised copy, however, we get a little more colour (emphasis mine):
Plaintiffs bring this lawsuit despite Amazon’s extensive efforts to impede the government’s investigation and hide information about its internal operations. Amazon executives systematically and intentionally deleted internal communications using the “disappearing message” feature of the Signal messaging app. Amazon prejudicially destroyed more than two years’ worth of such communications — from June 2019 to at least early 2022 — despite Plaintiffs’ instructing Amazon not to do so.
Executives of technology companies facing FTC scrutiny sure seem to like deleting evidence — allegedly, or whatever.
Leah Nylen and Matt Day, Bloomberg:
Amazon’s founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos personally ordered executives to accept more ads, even ones the company had internally labeled as “defects,” indicating they weren’t relevant to user searches, according to the new version of the complaint.
The FTC alleges that Amazon’s increased use of ads boosts profits while it harms sellers and consumers, making it harder for shoppers to find products they are searching for. “We’d be crazy not to” increase the number of advertisements shown to shoppers,” the FTC quoted Amazon executives as saying.
This sort of thing has been a recurring complaint for years, but it is apparently working for Amazon, no matter how much it sucks for customers. Amazon has become a place I dread shopping. It is just about my last choice — a retailer where I know I will be paying too much, and dodging drop-shipped junk left and right.
Obviously, there are still places where Amazon will often have much lower prices than local retailers — northern Canada springs to mind — and even a small savings can add up for many people. Amazon is also a boon for people who have disabilities. So there is this huge customer base for whom Amazon is still the best option, and they must wade through the gunge.
Stacy Mitchell, the Atlantic:
In Amazon’s case, the FTC lawsuit suggests that the company’s financial disclosures effectively conceal a major source of profits: its third-party marketplace, which connects buyers with outside sellers. Third-party transactions represent about 60 percent of Amazon’s sales volume. The company acts as a middleman, matching vendors with shoppers and providing logistics to get the product from one to the other. The FTC alleges that, within this third-party market, Amazon imposes exorbitant fees on the sellers who rely on its site to reach customers, fees well in excess of what it costs Amazon to provide those services, leading to big profits. How big? That’s redacted.
[…]
That leaves the public, as well as journalists, other businesses, and policy makers, with no way to evaluate the lawsuit’s pivotal claim. (The case is not expected to go to trial until 2026, if not later.) […]
Even though the FTC has settled numerous smaller cases, it is the big ones — Amazon, Facebook, and likely Apple soon — which are notable both for how ambitious they are and how sluggish progress is made. One might argue the FTC should scale its cases and pick its battles more carefully, but that would effectively become a license for a corporation to become so sprawling and complicated it defies investigation. The U.S. is, unfortunately, one of two places where such a massive investigation is possible, and the other one already tried.
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Dan Moren, Six Colors:
That’s where optics comes into play. Apple’s not publishing a 1500-word piece about why it disagrees with the EC’s ruling in order to convince the EC to change its mind. Presumably it made all of these arguments in its discussions with the regulator, and if it did not, then its army of lawyers is not doing its job.
No, this piece is for the public and the press (who will relay said arguments to the broad swath of the public that hasn’t consumed them firsthand). It’s there to point out all the great things that Apple does and cast it as the one being targeted unfairly by Europe. Apple’s just here making the world a better place! Fundamentally, Apple wants you to be party to its point of view here: that it’s the one being taken advantage of.
But that argument falls a bit flat when you boil the argument down to its essence.
It is still bizarre to read that press release even keeping in mind a presumed audience of journalists who might neutrally relay a few quotes and link to it. Surely someone at Apple knew what they were doing when they approved this thing; I do not run communications at a multitrillion-dollar company so this strategy is clearly lost on me.
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Kalhan Rosenblatt and Kyle Stewart, NBC News:
A bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to divest the popular social media company passed a crucial vote Thursday, as the company sought to rally users to its defense with a call to action that flooded some congressional offices with phone calls.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to pass the bill.
On Thursday, TikTok sent push notifications to some of its users to encourage them to call their representatives and ask them to vote against the bill. It displayed text that read “Stop a TikTok shutdown” in big, white letters before urging users to “speak up now.”
Apparently, representatives did not much appreciate having a bunch of people decades younger calling their offices and expressing their opinion on this legislation, in a manner not dissimilar from campaigns by Airbnb and Uber.
The introduction of this legislation makes no subtle statements in specifically targeting ByteDance and TikTok, and the platform’s data collection practices and opaque algorithmic feed. However, the bill (PDF) itself appears to apply more broadly to large internet companies — excluding travel and product review websites, for some reason — operated by a “foreign adversary country”.1
Even so, this proposal has many of the same problems as the last time I wrote about a TikTok ban about a year ago. Instead of attempting to protect users’ private data generally, it is trying to wall off select countries and, therefore, is subject to the same caveats as that recent Executive Order. Also, U.S. lawmakers love to paint TikTok’s recommendation engine as some kind of Chinese mind control experiment, but this should not be interpreted as an objection to political influence in social media feeds more generally. After all, U.S. social media companies have eagerly adopted customized feeds worldwide, driven by opaque American systems. Obviously, the U.S. is happier projecting its own power instead of China, but it would be a mistake to assume lawmakers are outraged by the idea of foreign influence as a concept.
During tonight’s State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden said it was a priority to “pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online”. It is unclear what this is referencing.
Unfortunately, there is not a cool forced acronym in the title:
This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’’.
Or “PAFACA” for short, I suppose. ↥︎
Jason Koebler, 404 Media:
The New York Times has filed a series of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones and variations in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its “5×6 grid” and “green tiles to indicate correct guesses.”
The Times’ two most recent ideas for games were blatantly ripped from “Only Connect” but, sure, some random people on GitHub are irrevocably diluting Wordle’s reputation. It is shaping up to be a big week for bullies.
Big news out of Brussels:
The European Commission has fined Apple over €1.8 billion for abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps to iPhone and iPad users (‘iOS users’) through its App Store. In particular, the Commission found that Apple applied restrictions on app developers preventing them from informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app (‘anti-steering provisions’). This is illegal under EU antitrust rules.
Margrethe Vestager, executive vice president of the European Commission, in the transcript of a speech announcing the Commission’s findings and penalty:
Let me give you three examples of Apple’s anti-steering obligations:
First, music streaming developers were not allowed to inform their users, inside their own apps, of cheaper prices for the same subscription on the internet.
Second, they were also not allowed to include links in their apps to lead consumers to their websites and pay lower prices there.
And third, they were also not allowed to contact their own newly acquired users, for instance by email, to inform them about pricing options after they set up an account.
These anti-steering rules have been among the most aggressively policed of all the App Store policies. They have snared apps for violations like having a link buried in some documentation, requiring even large developers to create special pages — perhaps because Apple saw even small transgressions as opening the door to loopholes. Better be as tedious and cautious as possible.
Nevertheless, a few years ago, the Commission started looking into complaints that streaming music services — specifically — were disadvantaged by these policies. One could argue its interest in this specific category is because it is one area where European developers have some clout: in addition to Spotify, Deezer and SoundCloud are also European products. That is not a criticism: it should be unsurprising for European regulators to investigate an area where they have the grounds to do so. Alas, this is a relatively narrow investigation ahead of the more comprehensive enforcement of the Digital Markets Act, so treat this as a preview of what is to come for non-compliant companies.
The Commission has illustrated this in its press release with an image that features the icons of — among other apps — Beats Music, which Apple acquired in 2014 and turned into Apple Music, and Rdio, which was shut down in 2015.
Aside from the curious infographic, the Commission released this decision without much supporting documentation, as usual. It promises more information is to come after it removes confidential details. It is kind of an awkward statement if you are used to reading legal opinions made by regulatory bodies elsewhere, many of which post the opinion is alongside the decision so it is possible to work through the reasoning. Here, you get a press release and a speech — that is all.
Apple’s response to this decision is barely restrained and looks, frankly, terrible for one of the world’s largest and most visible corporations. There is no friendly soft-touch language here, nor is it a zesty spare statement. This is a press release seasoned with piss and vinegar:
The primary advocate for this decision — and the biggest beneficiary — is Spotify, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Spotify has the largest music streaming app in the world, and has met with the European Commission more than 65 times during this investigation.
[…]
Despite that success, and the App Store’s role in making it possible, Spotify pays Apple nothing. That’s because Spotify — like many developers on the App Store — made a choice. Instead of selling subscriptions in their app, they sell them on their website. And Apple doesn’t collect a commission on those purchases.
[…]
When it comes to doing business, not everyone’s going to agree on the best deal. But it sure is hard to beat free.
Strictly speaking — and we all know how much Apple likes that — Spotify pays more than “nothing” to distribute its app on iOS because a developer membership is not free.
But — point taken. Apple is making its familiar claim that iOS software avoids its in-app purchase model is basically freeloading, but it is very happy for any developer’s success. Happy, happy, happy. Real fuckin’ happy. Left unsaid is how much of this infrastructure — hosting, updates, developer tooling, and so on — is required by Apple’s policies to be used by third-party developers. It has the same condescending vibe as the letter sent to Basecamp in 2020 amidst the Hey app fiasco. At the time, the App Review Board wrote “[t]hese apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years”, as though it is some kind of graceful obligation for Apple to support applications that do not inflate its own services income.
Nevertheless, Apple is standing firm. One might think it would reconsider its pugilism after facing this €1.8 billion penalty, investigations on five continents specifically regarding its payment policies, new laws written to address them, and flagging developer relations — but no. It wants to fight and it does not seem to care how that looks.
Today, Spotify has a 56 percent share of Europe’s music streaming market — more than double their closest competitor’s — […]
Apple does not state Spotify’s closest European competitor but, according to an earlier media statement, it is Amazon Music, followed Apple Music. This is a complicated comparison: Spotify has a free tier, and Amazon bundles a version of its service with a Prime membership. Apple Music’s free tier is a radio-only service.
On that basis, it does seem odd from this side of the Atlantic if the Commission concluded Apple’s in-app payment policies were responsible for increased prices if the leading service is available free. But that is not what the Commission actually found. It specifically says the longtime policies “preventing [apps] from informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app” are illegal, especially when combined with Apple’s first-party advantages. One effect among many could be higher prices paid by consumers. In the cases of Deezer and SoundCloud, for example, that is true: both apps charge more for in-app purchased subscriptions, compared to those purchased from the web, to cover Apple’s commission. But that is only one factor.
Carrying on:
[…] and pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped make them one of the most recognizable brands in the world. A large part of their success is due to the App Store, along with all the tools and technology that Spotify uses to build, update, and share their app with Apple users around the world.
This model has certainly played a role in Apple’s own success, according to an Apple-funded study (PDF): “Apple benefits as well, when the ecosystem it established expands and grows, either directly through App Store commissions or indirectly as the value users get from their iPhones increases”. Apple seems fixated on the idea that many apps of this type have their own infrastructure and, therefore, have little reason to get on board with Apple’s policies other than to the extent required. Having a universal software marketplace is probably very nice, but having each Spotify bug fix vetted by App Review probably provides less value than Apple wants to believe.
Like many companies, Spotify uses emails, social media, text messages, web ads, and many other ways to reach potential customers. Under the App Store’s reader rule, Spotify can also include a link in their app to a webpage where users can create or manage an account.
We introduced the reader rule years ago in response to feedback from developers like Spotify. And a lot of reader apps use that option to link users to a webpage — from e-readers to video streaming services. Spotify could too — but they’ve chosen not to.
About that second paragraph:
This change was not made because of developer requests. It was agreed to as part of a settlement with authorities in Japan in September 2021.
Meanwhile, the European Commission says it began investigating Apple in June 2020, and informed the company of its concerns in April 2021, then narrowing them last year. I mention this in case there was any doubt this policy change was due to regulatory pressure.
This rule change may have been “introduced” in September 2021, but it was not implemented until the end of March 2022. It has been in effect for less than two years — hardly the “years ago” timeframe Apple says.
For clarification, external account management links are subject to strict rules and Apple approval. Remember how Deezer and SoundCloud offer in-app purchases? Apple’s policies say that means they cannot offer an account management link in their apps.
This worldwide policy is specific to “reader” apps and is different from region-specific external purchase capabilities for non-“reader” apps. It only permits a single external link — one specific URL — which is only capable of creating and managing accounts, not individually purchased items. Still it is weird how Spotify does not take advantage of this permission.
Spotify, a “reader” app, nevertheless attempted to ship app updates which included a way to get an email with information about buying audiobooks. These updates were rejected because Spotify is only able to email customers in ways that do not circumvent in-app purchases for specific items.
You can quibble with Spotify’s attempts to work around in-app purchase rules — it is obviously trying to challenge them in a very public way — but it is Apple which has such restrictive policies around external links, down to how they may be described. It is a by-the-letter reading to be as strict as possible, lest any loopholes be exploited. This inflexibility would surely be explained by Apple as its “level playing field”, but we all know that is not entirely true
Instead, Spotify wants to bend the rules in their favor by embedding subscription prices in their app without using the App Store’s In-App Purchase system. They want to use Apple’s tools and technologies, distribute on the App Store, and benefit from the trust we’ve built with users — and to pay Apple nothing for it.
It is not entirely clear Spotify actually wants to do any of these things; it is more honest to say it has to do them if it wants to have an iPhone app. Spotify has routinely disputed various iOS policies only to turn around and reject Apple’s solutions. Spotify complained that users could not play music natively through the HomePod, but has not taken advantage of third-party music app support on the device added in 2020. Instead, it was Apple’s Siri improvements last year that brought Spotify to the HomePod, albeit in an opaque way.
If we accept Apple’s premise, however, it remains a mystery why Apple applies its platform monetization policy to iOS and the related operating systems it has spawned, but not to MacOS. By what criteria, other than Apple’s policy choices, are Mac developers able to sell digital goods however they want — unless they use the Mac App Store — but iOS developers must ask Apple’s permission to include a link to an external payment flow? And that is the conceded, enhanced freedom version of this policy.
There is little logic to the iOS in-app purchase rules, which do not apply equally to physical goods, reader apps, or even some à la carte digital goods. Nobody has reason to believe this façade any longer.
Apple obviously believes the Mac is a different product altogether with different policies, and that is great. The relatively minor restrictions it has imposed still permit a level of user control unimaginable on iOS, and Apple does not seem to have an appetite to further lock it down to iOS levels. But the differences are a matter of policy, not technology.
Apple justifies its commission saying it “reflects the value Apple provides developers through ongoing investments in the tools, technologies, and services”. That is a new standard which apparently applies only to its iOS-derived platforms, compared to the way it invested in tools for Mac development. Indeed, Apple used to charge more for developer memberships when third-party software was only for the Mac, but even the top-of-the-line $3,500 Premier membership was probably not 30% of most developers’ revenue. Apple also charged for new versions of Mac OS X at this time. Now, it distributes all that for free; developers pay a small annual fee, and a more substantial rate to use the only purchasing mechanism they can use for most app types in most parts of the world.
For whatever reason — philosophical or financial — Apple’s non-Mac platforms are restricted and it will defend that stance until it is unable to do so. And, no matter how bad that looks, I kind of get it. I believe there could be a place for a selective and monitored software distribution system, where some authority figure has attested to the safety and authenticity of an app. That is not so different conceptually from how Apple’s notarization policies will be working in Europe.
I oscillate between appreciating and detesting an app store model, even if the App Store is a mess. But even when I am in a better mood, however, it seems crystal clear that such a system would be far better if it were not controlled by the platform owner. The conflict of interest is simply too great. It would be better if some arm’s-length party, perhaps spiritually similar to Meta’s Oversight Board, would control software and developer policies. I doubt that would fix every complaint with the App Store and App Review process but I bet it would have been a good start.
The consequences of being so pugnacious for over fifteen years of the App Store model has, I think, robbed Apple of the chance to set things right. Regulators around the world are setting new inconsistent standards based on fights between large corporations and gigantic ones, with developers of different sizes lobbying for their own wish lists. Individual people have no such influence, but all of these corporations likely believe they are doing what is right and best for their users.
As the saying goes, pressure makes diamonds, and Apple’s policies are being tested. I hope it can get this right, yet press releases like this one gives me little reason to believe in positive results from Apple’s forcibly loosened grip on its most popular platform. And with the Digital Markets Act now in effect, those stakes are high. I never imagined Apple would be thrilled for the rules of its platform to be upended by courts and lawmakers nor excited by a penalty in the billions, but it sure seems like it would be better for everybody if Apple embraced reality.
I only drop into “Decoder” every now and again, but this recent episode is fantastic. It is a reversal of the usual format — instead of Nilay Patel interviewing an executive, guest host Hank Green chats with Patel about the Verge’s business and publishing on the web. It seems a little silly for me to recommend an episode from a very popular podcast, but I do think this one is worth checking out.
XOXO Festival is coming back in August, “one last time”. I do not know if you like playing with toggles and switches but this website has light mode, dark mode, and — well — see for yourself.
Jason Koebler, 404 Media:
We have recently been getting bombarded with Instagram Reels of influencers explaining how they make five figures a month by using AI to create tons of viral TikTok pages using stolen celebrity clips juxtaposed next to Minecraft gameplay footage. This strategy, the influencers say, allows them to passively make $10,000 a month by flooding social media platforms with stolen and low-effort clips while working from private helicopters, the beach, the ski slope, a park, etc.
What I found was a complex ecosystem of content parasitism, with thousands of people using a variety of AI tools to make low-quality spammy videos that recycle Reddit AMAs, weird “Would You Rather” games, AI-narrated “scary ocean” clips, ChatGPT-generated fun facts, slideshows of tweets, clips lifted from celebrities, YouTubers, and podcasts.
Abbie Richards, in a video for Media Matters co-presented with “Joe Rogan”:
So that’s how you make a conspiracy theory video, but the more important question is “why?”
Remember when I said that the videos need to be over sixty seconds long? The reason is because art really requires that people be present in the moment and pause and really listen to — I’m kidding, the reason is money.
In case you needed another reason to watch it, this video contains the sentence “I don’t feel like ‘spooky sea shanty’ is the right vibe for Play-Doh conspiracy theory”.
Kate Wagner wrote, for Road & Track, a exploration of Formula 1 from the perspective of a cycling journalist who does not have a driving license, and it is wonderful:
One thing that strikes me about Formula 1 is its unexpected resemblance to fencing — it is an absolutely poised and disciplined affair. Recently, for my 30th birthday, I took up medieval sword fighting — historical European martial arts, they call it. For the first two weeks we worked on standing in a good medieval stance, always prepared to move. Sword fighting is learned through what are called set plays, specific motions of sword and body combined into one fluid action. But when you watch people who are really good at sword fighting, an ornate, flowing dance emerges from these seemingly disparate parts. Formula 1 is like that. When the cars line up on the grid, everything is totally neat and rehearsed, completely in its place. Tires, people, staff, even journalists. The teams are meted out in perfect sections — they don’t call it the grid for nothing. But when time comes for the sprint to begin, team members move in perfect coordination, synchronized. They have stances and footwork. This is most true of the pit crew and the astonishing speed at which they travel through space as one organism, totally practiced in set plays of their own. This was beautiful to watch in real life. The unfurling of the apparatus of the setup, groups peeling back one by one until there are only these alien cars, these technological marvels kissing the ground. Before the heartbeat, they respirated.
I have followed Formula 1 with varying levels of dedication for about twenty years, and this is one of the best things I have ever read on the subject. It is a fascinating contradiction to many of the values I hold dear: it is an environmentally devastating product of unimaginable wealth, positioned with a level of glamour I cannot see in myself. But it is, as perfectly captured by Wagner, a precise orchestra of mechanical, digital, and human control.
You may notice I am linking to the Internet Archive’s copy instead of Road & Track directly. That is because this article — published just three days ago — has been removed for unknown reasons.
Obviously, someone in a position of power didn’t like Kate’s perspective. That’s the only conclusion I can think of as to why the article was pulled within 48 hours of publication. Even Kate’s author profile page on Road & Track has gone missing. Somebody just wants all of this, Kate included, to go away.
I cannot understand why anyone at Road & Track would believe this would be a good idea. I only learned of this article because it was deleted and now I am mostly offended the magazine would dare remove such an exquisite piece of writing.
Update: Daniel Pund, editor-in-chief of Road & Track, told Patrick Redford of Defector the article was deleted because Pund “felt it was the wrong story for our publication”. It is hard to know what to make of that — given the widespread praise, it sure seems like something any magazine would be proud to publish.
Update: More commentary from Rusty Foster at Today in Tabs.
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Jason Koebler and Samantha Cole, 404 Media:
Almost every platform has some sort of post “firehose,” API, or way of accessing huge amounts of user posts. Famously, Twitter and Reddit used to give these away for free. Now they do not, and charging access for these posts has become big business for those companies. This is just to say that the existence of Automattic’s firehose is not anomalous in an internet ecosystem that trades on data. But this firehose also means that the average user doesn’t and can’t know what companies are getting direct access to their posts, and what they’re being used for.
I am not particularly surprised to learn that public posts on WordPress.com blogs are part of a massive feed, but I am shocked it is not as obvious that self-hosted WordPress sites with Jetpack installed are automatically opted into it as well. For something as popular as Jetpack is — over five million users, according to its WordPress.org installation page — I was surprised by how infrequently this has been mentioned: aside from privacy policies and official documentation, I found a 2013 article on the Next Web, a Reddit comment from a few years ago, and a handful of content marketing specialists suggesting it helps with search optimization.
After avoiding questions from 404, Automattic says it is “winding down” firehose access.
Samantha Cole, 404 Media:
Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.
The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.
- We currently block, by default, major AI platform crawlers — including ones from the biggest tech companies — and update our lists as new ones launch.
[…]
We are also working directly with select AI companies as long as their plans align with what our community cares about: attribution, opt-outs, and control.
We will only share public content that’s hosted on WordPress.com and Tumblr, and only from sites that haven’t opted out.
We are not including content from sites hosted elsewhere even if they use Automattic plugins like Jetpack or WooCommerce.
I am not sure which crawlers are currently being blocked or how that is being accomplished, but it does not appear to be in WordPress blogs’ robots.txt files.
The New York Times comprehensively blocks known machine learning crawlers, which you can verify by viewing its robots.txt file; the crawlers we are interested in are listed near the bottom, just above all the sitemaps. That is also true for Tumblr. But when I checked a bunch of WordPress.com sites at random — by searching “site:wordpress.com inurl:2024” — I found much shorter automatically generated robots.txt files, similar to WordPress’ own. I am not sure why I could not find a single WordPress.com blog with the same opt-out signal.
What is implied in Automattic’s disclosure is how it is preparing to switch Tumblr and WordPress blogs from the current opt-in model to an opt-out one. Both platforms have been popular among artists and I am not sure they would expect their contributions to become fodder for machines.
Then again, that is true for everybody who has ever posted anything on the web: it is all training data now, unless you can explicitly say otherwise.
Two weeks ago, Apple confirmed it would roll back the capabilities of Progressive Web Apps in the E.U. to the days of iPhone home screen bookmarks. It said it would need to do this to comply with the Digital Markets Act, implying it interpreted alternative browser requirements to apply equally to web apps:
[…] Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps. And so, to comply with the DMA’s requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU.
However, in an update to that page, Apple is now undoing this regression, as noted by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
With today’s announcement, Apple has reversed course and said that Home Screen web apps will continue to exist as they did pre-iOS 17.4 in the European Union. “This support means Home Screen web apps continue to be built directly on WebKit and its security architecture, and align with the security and privacy model for native apps on iOS,” Apple explains today.
This means that all Home Screen web apps will still be powered by WebKit, regardless of whether the web app is added using Safari or not – exactly as it works today and has for years.
Apple is framing this as a decision it made because it is just so dang nice — “[w]e have received requests to continue to offer support for Home Screen web apps in iOS, therefore we will continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability”. If this is true, that means its earlier statement must have been wrong — there was no legal rationale for web app regressions, only a preference.
A more likely explanation is that the DMA is complicated and Apple is still figuring out what changes it mandates in iOS. This is a big package of legislation that needs interpretation. Apple’s lawyers now seem to think PWAs can still be WebKit-only. Whether regulators will agree is something we will find out when iOS 17.4 is released and, at the same time, whether Apple was correct to blame the law.
Update: Michael Acton, Financial Times:
The European Commission welcomed Apple’s announcement, saying that it had “directly or indirectly” received more than 500 complaints about the company’s original plan.
“Contrary to Apple’s public representation, the removal of Home Screen Web Apps on iOS in the EU was neither required, nor justified, under the Digital Markets Act,” a commission spokesperson added.
A version of this entire debacle which is fair to Apple is that it misunderstood its obligations, and would never have degraded PWAs in the E.U. if not for its too-careful interpretation of the law. But it does not get to take credit for undoing its mistake.
Today’s announcement from the Competition Bureau reveals an expansion in the scope of its investigation into Google’s advertising business, something it has been looking into for over three years. One of the problems faced by regulators like these is the sheer scale of an operation like Google’s, and it should not be a surprise that these things take considerable time, effort, and money.
Even so, they are important. Corporations need to know their business resides within legal norms, and their anticompetitive practices can still be restricted. Whether it is necessary to continuously expand the scope is a great question and I hope to see an answer in whatever final report is produced by the Bureau. Perhaps there is no good way of addressing the sole market of video ads — the investigation’s original subject — without also looking into the multiple other business layers Google has constructed.
The trial for similar allegation in the United States wrapped up in November, and it will be adjudicated later this year. E.U. authorities told Google last year it would need to sell part of its ad business. In the U.K., an investigation is ongoing, while French regulators penalized Google in 2021.
Even though it has only been a couple of days since word got out that Apple was cancelling development of its long-rumoured though never confirmed car project, there have been a wave of takes explaining what this means, exactly. The uniqueness of this project was plenty intriguing because it seemed completely out of left field. Apple makes computers of different sizes, sure, but the largest surface you would need for any of them is a desk. And now the company was working on a car?
Much reporting during its development was similarly bizarre due to the nature of the project. Instead of leaks from within the technology industry, sources were found in auto manufacturing. Public records requests were used by reporters at the Guardian, IEEE Spectrum, and Business Insider — among others — to get a peek at its development in a way that is not possible for most of Apple’s projects. I think the unusual nature of it has broken some brains, though, and we can see that in coverage of its apparent cancellation.
Mark Gurman, of Bloomberg, in an analysis supplementing the news he broke of Project Titan’s demise. Gurman writes that Apple will now focus its development efforts on generative “A.I.” products:
The big question is how soon AI might make serious money for Apple. It’s unlikely that the company will have a full-scale AI lineup of applications and features for a few years. And Apple’s penchant for user privacy could make it challenging to compete aggressively in the market.
For now, Apple will continue to make most of its money from hardware. The iPhone alone accounts for about half its revenue. So AI’s biggest potential in the near term will be its ability to sell iPhones, iPads and other devices.
These paragraphs, from perhaps the highest-profile reporter on the Apple beat, present the company’s usual strategy for pretty much everything it makes as a temporary measure until it can — uhh — do what, exactly? What is the likelihood that Apple sells access to generative services to people who do not have its hardware products? Those odds seem very, very poor to me, and I do not understand why Gurman is framing this in the way he is.
While it is true a few Apple services are available to people who do not use the company’s hardware products, they are exclusively media subscriptions. It does not make sense to keep people from legally watching the expensive shows it makes for Apple TV Plus. iCloud features are also available outside the hardware ecosystem but, again, that seems more like a pragmatic choice for syncing. Generative “A.I.” does not fit those models and it is not, so far, a profit-making endeavour. Microsoft and OpenAI are both losing money every time their products are used, even by paying customers.
I could imagine some generative features could come to Pages or Keynote at iCloud.com, but only because they were also added to native applications that are only available on Apple’s platforms. But Apple still makes the vast majority of its money by selling computers to people; its services business is mostly built on those customers adding subscriptions to their Apple-branded hardware.
“A.I.” features are likely just that: features, existing in a larger context. If Apple wants, it can use them to make editing pictures better in Photos, or make Siri somewhat less stupid. It could also use trained models to make new products; Gurman nods toward the Vision Pro’s Persona feature as something which uses “artificial intelligence”. But the likelihood of Apple releasing high-profile software features separate and distinct from its hardware seems impossibly low. It has built its SoCs specifically for machine learning, after all.
Speaking of new products, Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle, of the New York Times, wrote a decent insiders’ narrative of the car’s development and cancellation. But this paragraph seems, quite simply, wrong:
The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.
I do not understand on what basis Apple “has struggled to develop new products” in the last thirteen years. Since 2011, Apple has introduced the Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro, migrated Macs to in-house SoCs causing an industry-wide reckoning, and added a bevy of services. And those are just the headlining products; there are also HomePods and AirTags, Macs with Retina displays, iPhones with facial recognition, a range of iPads that support the Apple Pencil, also a new product. None of those things existed before 2011.
These products are not all wild success stories, and some of them need a lot of work to feel great. But that list disproves the idea that Apple has “struggled” with launching new things. If anything, there has been a steady narrative over that same period that Apple has too many products. The rest of this Times report seems fine, but this one paragraph — and, really, just the first sentence — is simply incorrect.
These are all writers who cover Apple closely. They are familiar with the company’s products and strategies. These takes feel like they were written without any of that context or understanding, and it truly confuses me how any of them finished writing these paragraphs and thought they accurately captured a business they know so much about.
U.S. President Joe Biden today signed an executive order, previously covered, which intends to limit the sale and distribution of Americans’ sensitive data to “countries of concern”:
To address this threat and to take further steps with respect to the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13873, the order authorizes the Attorney General, in coordination with the Secretary of Homeland Security and in consultation with the heads of relevant agencies, to issue, subject to public notice and comment, regulations to prohibit or otherwise restrict the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern and to provide safeguards around other activities that can give those countries access to sensitive data. […]
According to a fact sheet (PDF) from the U.S. Department of Justice, six countries are being considered for restrictions: “China (including Hong Kong and Macau), Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela”. The sensitive data which will be covered includes attributes like a person’s name, their location, and health and financial information.
This sounds great in theory, but it will be difficult to enforce in practice as data brokers operating outside the U.S. will not have the same restrictions. That is not to say it is useless. However, it is not as effective as creating conditions hostile to this kind of exploitation to begin with. You should not have to worry that your precise location is being shared with a data broker somewhere just because you checked the weather, nor should you need to be extremely diligent in reviewing the specific policies of each app or website you visit.
See Also: Dell Cameron, Wired.
Byron Tau, in an excerpt from his new book “Means of Control”, as published in Wired with a clarification in brackets by me:
Initially, PlanetRisk was sampling data country by country, but it didn’t take long for the team to wonder what it would cost to buy the entire world. The sales rep at UberMedia provided the answer: For a few hundred thousand dollars a month, the company would provide a global feed of [the location of] every phone on earth that the company could collect on. The economics were impressive. For the military and intelligence community, a few hundred thousand a month was essentially a rounding error — in 2020, the intelligence budget was $62.7 billion. Here was a powerful intelligence tool for peanuts.
Locomotive, the first version of which was coded in 2016, blew away Pentagon brass. One government official demanded midway through the demo that the rest of it be conducted inside a SCIF, a secure government facility where classified information could be discussed. The official didn’t understand how or what PlanetRisk was doing but assumed it must be a secret. A PlanetRisk employee at the briefing was mystified. “We were like, well, this is just stuff we’ve seen commercially,” they recall. “We just licensed the data.” After all, how could marketing data be classified?
Government officials were so enthralled by the capability that PlanetRisk was asked to keep Locomotive quiet. It wouldn’t be classified, but the company would be asked to tightly control word of the capability to give the military time to take advantage of public ignorance of this kind of data and turn it into an operational surveillance program.
In the where are they now? vein, UberMedia was acquired by Near, a name you might recognize from recent coverage of how its data was used to target visitors to abortion clinics. Sen. Ron Wyden has requested (PDF) an investigation from the FTC and SEC; the former has been on a roll settling data broker and privacy violations.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is canceling a decade-long effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.
2023 California testing reports, made public earlier this month, showed Apple had been running its cars more than ever. In hindsight and with the context of this news, it looks from the outside like all that was a last-chance effort to assess the likelihood of the project’s success.
This must be devastating for a lot of employees. It is also a testament to Apple’s lack of comment regarding unreleased products. Tim Cook disclosed a little about the company’s efforts in self-driving, though this minor acknowledgement would have come anyway because of those mandatory reports. But because Apple was not, officially, developing a car, it does not need to say anything about the project’s future. Difficult internally, I am sure, but easy in public.
I have to say I am looking forward to the inevitable tell-all article or book. Also, how much do you think Apple wants for the track?
What people with Big Business Brains often like to argue about the unethical but wildly successful ad tech industry is that it is not as bad as it looks because your individual data does not have any real use or value. Ad tech vendors would not bother retaining such granular details because it is beneficial, they say, only in a more aggregated and generalized form.
The problem with this argument is that it keeps getting blown up by their demonstrable behaviour.1 For a recent example, consider Avast, an antivirus and security software provider, which installed to users’ computers a web browser toolbar that promised to protect against third-party tracking but, in actual fact, was collecting browsing history for — and you are not going to believe this — third-party tracking and advertising companies on behalf of the Avast subsidiary Jumpshot. It was supposed to be anonymized but, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, this “proprietary algorithm” was so ineffective that Avast managed to collect six petabytes of revealing browsing history between 2014–2020. Then, it sold access (PDF):
[…] For example, from May 2017 to April 2019, Jumpshot granted LiveRamp, a data company that specializes in various identity services, a “world-wide license” to use consumers’ granular browsing information, including all clicks, timestamps, persistent identifiers, and cookie values, for a number of specified purposes. […]
One agreement between LiveRamp and Jumpshot stated that Jumpshot would use two services: first, “ID Syncing Services,” in which “LiveRamp and [Jumpshot] will engage in a synchronization and matching of identifiers,” and second, “Data Distribution Services,” in which “LiveRamp will ingest online Client Data and facilitate the distribution of Client’s Data (i.e., data segments and attributes of its users associated with Client IDs) to third-party platforms for the purpose of performing ad targeting and measurement.” These provisions permit the targeting of Avast consumers using LiveRamp’s ability to match Respondents’ persistent identifiers to LiveRamp’s own persistent identifiers, thereby associating data collected from Avast users with LiveRamp’s data.
We know these allegations due to the FTC’s settlement — though, I should say, these claims have not been proven, because Avast paid a $16.5 million penalty and said it would not use any of the data it collected “for advertising purposes”. The caveat makes this settlement feel a little incomplete to me. While there are other ways aggregated personal data can be used, like in market research, it does not seem Avast and Jumpshot were all that careful about obtaining consent when this software was first rolled out. When they did, the results were predictable (PDF):
Respondents had direct evidence that many consumers did not want their browsing information to be sold to third parties, even when they were told that the information would only be shared in de-identified form. In 2019, when Avast asked users of other Avast antivirus software to opt-in to the collection and sale of de-identified browsing information, fewer than 50% of consumers did so.
I am interpreting “fewer than 50%” as “between 40–49%”; if 18% of users had opted in, I expect the FTC would have said “fewer than 20%”. Most people do not want to be tracked. For comparison, this seems to be at the upper end of App Tracking Transparency opt-in rates.
I noted the LiveRamp connection when I first linked to investigations of Avast’s deceptive behaviour, though it seems Wolfie Christl beat me to the punch in December 2019. Christl also pointed out Jumpshot’s supply of data to Lotame, something the FTC also objected to. LiveRamp’s whole thing is resolving audiences based on personal information, though it says it will not return this information directly. Still, this granular identity resolution is not the kind of thing most people would like to participate in. Even if they consent, it is unclear if they are fully aware of the consequences.
This is just one settlement but it helps illustrate the distribution and mingling of granular user data. Marketers may be restricted to larger audiences and it may not be possible to directly extract users’ personally identifiable information — though it is often trivial to do so. But it is not comforting to be told collected data is only useful as part of a broader set. First of all, it is not: there are existing albeit limited ways it is possible to target small numbers of people. Even if that were true, though, this highly specific data is the foundation of larger sets. Ad tech companies want to follow you as specifically and closely as they can, and there are only nominal safeguards because collecting it all is too damn valuable.
Well, and also how weird it is to be totally okay with collecting a massive amount of data with virtually no oversight or regulations so long as industry players pinky promise to only use some of it. ↥︎
When I linked to Tim Burke’s indictment yesterday, I compared the ridiculousness of the case to Josh Renaud’s near-indictment for viewing the source of a webpage. I missed an obviously more analogous and equally outrageous case: that of Aaron Swartz.
Sarah Jeong, of the Verge,
[…] Swartz was prosecuted for scraping JSTOR, a paywalled academic database that could be freely accessed on MIT’s campus network. Theoretically, his access began to “exceed authorization” when he signed into the network as Gary Host (G. Host, or Ghost), and then when, after campus IT attempted to block his computer for excessive server requests, he spoofed his DNS.
These are disproportionate consequences for actions which are, at worst, mischievous, not criminal. And we need a little mischief.
This story from Troy Hunt is a maddening read, though not because of Hunt. It is a poisonous stew of bad security practices, inconsistent behaviour, and bugs. It is a level of sloppiness that is far too common at businesses large and small. This is everything they should not be doing.
Online privacy isn’t just something you should be hoping for – it’s something you should expect. You should ensure your browsing history stays private and is not harvested by ad networks.
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Justin Garcia, Dan Sullivan, Jay Cridlin, and Olivia George, Tampa Bay Times:
Tampa media consultant Tim Burke was charged Thursday with 14 federal crimes related to alleged computer hacks at Fox News.
[…]
According to the indictment, Burke and an unnamed person used “compromised credentials” to access and save protected commercial broadcast video streams, then disseminate specific clips after taking steps to mask where they came from and how they were obtained.
The indictment, thankfully embedded by the Times, makes it sound like Burke was some master hacker. But in an interview with Mathew Ingram of Columbia Journalism Review, Burke’s defence attorney Mark Rasch has a different explanation:
Here’s what we know: Fox News does the Kanye West–Tucker Carlson interview. They broadcast two hours of it. At the same time, Fox, like many other broadcasters, are livestreaming continuously to many different entities — to their affiliates, and so on — and these live feeds are in high definition and encrypted. But at the same time, they are also broadcasting low-definition, unencrypted feeds. They’re internet addressable, with no user ID and password required. All you need to know is the URL.
There are third-party sites that transmit these live feeds as a service. They have password-protected websites. And in this case, somebody on the internet provided Tim with the publicly posted user ID and password for a demo account on one of these services that are used by broadcasters. So Tim logs in to the site, and the site automatically downloads to his computer a list of all the livestreams on the site. The important thing to note here is that those livestreams did not require a user ID and password to access them, just a URL.
If this is as described, it is as idiotic to treat Burke as a criminal it was for Missouri Governor Mike Parson to go after a journalist who viewed the source of a webpage and reported it was leaking teachers’ Social Security Numbers. Charges were not filed in that case but the prosecutor left dangling a suspicion that it was still illegal. Now, there is Burke being charged with fourteen counts for similarly bogus reasons, and questioning whether what he does is actually journalism. It is nonsense.
Oh, and there is a Vice connection.
Alexander Saeedy and Alexandra Bruell, Wall Street Journal:
Vice Media said it would stop publishing content on its flagship website and plans to cut hundreds of jobs, following a failed effort by owner Fortress Investment Group to sell the embattled digital publisher and its brands.
From the internal memo sent by Bruce Dixon, Vice CEO:
We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously. Moving forward, we will look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model. As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly.
The way Vice has “distributed [its] digital content […] previously” is by having a website. That it is not “cost-effective” to run a website is creating rumours that it is about to be shuttered without any real effort at preservation.
This is a real shame; Vice had some of the best privacy and security coverage in the industry. I am sure I have referenced the site’s work at least dozens of times. Its record is imperfect, especially recently, but it has published solid, creative reporting for decades. Four of its former writers founded 404 Media last year, and other have found new gigs. Still, if all these articles disappear from everywhere but the Internet Archive, it will be a deep loss.