Apple Aims to Source All U.S. iPhones From India by End of 2026 ft.com

Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, John Reed, and Kathrin Hille, Financial Times:

Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump’s trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China.

The push builds on Apple’s strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60mn iPhones sold annually in the US by the end of 2026.

Obviously this is not fulfilling the stated aim of U.S. tariffs to onshore manufacturing of all kinds of products, including iPhones. But it seems unlikely to substantially lessen our global dependence on supply chains in China, either — in addition to individual parts sourced there, these reporters say factories in China are still responsible for “pre-assembled component sets” which are brought to India for final iPhone assembly.

Google Ends Support for Early Nest Thermostats, Degrading Their Functionality arstechnica.com

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica:

As Google points out, these products have had a long life, and they’re not being rendered totally inoperable. Come October 25, 2025, these devices will no longer receive software updates or connect to Google’s cloud services. That means you won’t be able to control them from the Google Home app or via Assistant (or more likely Gemini by that point). The devices will still work as a regular dumb thermostat to control temperature, and scheduling will remain accessible from the thermostat’s screen.

Google stopped selling the second-generation Nest Thermostat in 2015. A ten-year lifespan may be acceptable by consumer electronics standards, it is not impressive for a thermostat. And, while a typical programmable thermostat might slowly fail on its own accord, it is disconcerting that Google can simply pull the plug on its smart features.

This is, however, a fairly graceful degradation of its functionality, all things considered. Nests will apparently continue to work like a programmable thermostat. Also, after Ecobee ended support for its earliest thermostat models last year, it sounded like newer models’ HomeKit integration would allow smart features to keep working when Ecobee discontinues those, too. It would be better if Google could have done something similar with the Nest. It is not encouraging for the smart home fantasy.

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Making ‘Careless People’ Care pluralistic.net

Cory Doctorow:

The important thing about Facebook’s carelessness is that it wasn’t the result of the many grave personality defects in Facebook’s top executives – it was the result of policy choices. Government decisions not to enforce antitrust law, to allow privacy law to wither on the vine, to expand IP law to give Facebook a weapon to shut down interoperable rivals – these all created the enshittogenic environment that allowed the careless people who run Facebook to stop caring.

The corollary: if we change the policy environment, we can make these careless people – and their successors, who run other businesses we rely upon – care. They may never care about us, but we can make them care about what we might do to them if they give in to their carelessness.

This is a prudent conclusion to draw from “Careless People”. It is tempting to wonder if things would be much different with others in charge, but what Meta represents today is not an individualized problem.

Apple and Meta Are Mad Over Minimal E.U. Fines ec.europa.eu

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission found that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), and that Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data. Therefore, the Commission has fined Apple and Meta with €500 million and €200 million respectively.

The two decisions come after extensive dialogue with the companies concerned allowing them to present in detail their views and arguments.

A Financial Times article last month suggested these fines would be “minimal”, but I suppose that is entirely relative. Apple and Meta could have been fined up to 10% of their annual worldwide revenue — earnings which total hundreds of billions of dollars each — so €500 million does, in fact, seem to be “minimal”. And that speaks to the power and size of these corporations. Call it a warning.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

“The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards,” Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said.

[…]

“Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free,” Apple said. “We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

I am halfway through “The Big Myth” and it is striking to read so many of the same complaints from detractors of regulation no matter when or for what issue. Pick any of the past couple-hundred years and it is apparently a regulatory sweet spot, according to industry representatives at the time. These complaints feel derivative.

That does not mean all new regulation is justified, well-considered, or without negative consequences. However, it is not as though either Apple or Meta stumbled into the exact structure they did to comply with their interpretation of the law on paper while evading the Commission’s expectations. Nobody expects either company to “give away [their] technology for free”, in the words of an unnamed Apple spokesperson. One cannot, for example, run iOS apps on non-Apple system, and the company builds the cost of software and updates into each product’s price.

The Anti-Pirate Code fedi.rib.gay

Melissa Lewis on Bluesky:

TIL: The 2000s piracy PSA used a font designed by the fantastic Just van Rossum, whose brother Guido created the Python programming language.

[…]

I reached out to van Rossum, and Xband Rough is indeed an “illegal clone” of FF Confidential; it’s just been around forever and is ubiquitous. I have no idea whether the PSA used the original, and felt too shy to ask!

Rib”:

Naturally, it would be hilarious if the anti-piracy campaign actually turned out to have used this pirated font, so I went sleuthing and quickly found a PDF from the campaign site with the font embedded (https://web.archive.org/web/[…]150605_8PP_brochure.pdf).

So I chucked it into FontForge and yep, turns out the campaign used a pirated font the entire time!

They are more like guidelines, you could say.

On the ‘Streaming Is More Expensive Than Cable’ Complaint birchtree.me

Matt Birchler:

A social media post flew by today where someone was complaining that they stopped paying $180 for cable and now they’re paying $200 for streaming apps. I see this sort of complaint a lot, and I find myself feeling like I’m taking crazy pills whenever I do: I had cable, I know how bad it was, and the new streaming world seems so much better to me, even if it is creeping up in price.

I always appreciate when people bring evidence to a discussion instead of basing their analysis entirely on vibes. Here, Birchler demonstrates the combined cost of streaming services is, for lots of people in the U.S., less than cable television.

I remember when the cost of cable was a routine complaint. You paid for all these channels, but you only watched a handful of things on three of them — and, so, would it not be better if we could just buy the channels we wanted?

I have nothing to support this, but I strongly suspect the rosy glasses reaction to cable in a streaming world is driven by two things. First, the lack of bundling feels worse. If you were told you could get a “complete streaming package” for $60 per month — including Apple TV Plus, Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Peacock, and Prime Video — that might sound like a better deal than subscribing to them individually for the same total cost. A single cable subscription made you feel like you were getting everything, while you now need multiple subscriptions if you like to watch a lot of stuff.

Second, as Birchler acknowledges, some stuff still is not available on streaming, and so some people still feel they must add a cable subscription, too. Because most of the big streaming services are owned by the same broadcasters as cable channels, it gives them an opportunity to double-dip.

Canadian Election Coverage and Meta’s Response to the Online News Act thelogic.co

Martin Patriquin, the Logic:

More than 25 different Facebook accounts, some with Canadian-themed names, have promoted multiple fake news articles involving political actors, including a three-minute video of a deepfake CBC report fronted by anchor Rosemary Barton, in which a deepfake Musk, appearing on a deepfake Joe Rogan podcast, accuses a deepfake Carney of lying about a non-existent passive income scheme.

The posts are widespread on the Meta-owned platform, with 25 per cent of Canadians saying they’ve seen content on Facebook mimicking legitimate news in the last month, according to the Canadian Digital Media Research Network (CDMRN), which is part of a digital literacy coalition monitoring the federal election campaign.

Leyland Cecco, the Guardian:

More than a quarter of Canadians have been exposed to fake political content on social media that is “more sophisticated and more politically polarizing” as the country prepares to vote in a federal election, researchers have found, warning that platforms must increase protections amid a “dramatic acceleration” of online disinformation in the final weeks of the campaign.

In a new report released on Friday, Canada’s Media Ecosystem Observatory found a growing number of Facebook ads impersonating legitimate news sources were instead promoting fraudulent investment schemes, often involving cryptocurrency.

Rob Brown, reporter for CBC News in Calgary, interviewed Aengus Bridgman of the Media Ecosystem Observatory — previously linked — about Meta’s restriction of news links for Canadian users. This is one effect of the Online News Act, which required Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links on their platforms. Meta, in deciding not to, has effectively permitted only links which do not qualify as “news” to spread among Canadians on its platforms.

Meta may be a belligerent and frustrating company, but the Online News Act remains a blight. In a stopped-clock credit to the Conservatives, they pledge to reverse it, something which all parties ought to consider. We can do better with policies that do not, in practice, discourage the sharing of links to news stories.

The Paid A.I. Hype Guys ft.com

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, Financial Times:

One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

The (verified) X accounts producing threads of links to bad A.I. products, boosted by dozens of replies from other verified X accounts, are annoying spam, but seem relatively harmless. But the newsletters profiled here are curious.

One is Rowan Cheung’s Rundown AI newsletter, which Cheung bills as the “world’s most read daily AI newsletter”, which is different from the other newsletter in the article, Zain Kahn’s Superhuman AI, the “world’s biggest AI newsletter”. As alluded to by Venkataramakrishnan but not expanded upon, both attract some heavy-hitting sponsors. The Rundown was recently sponsored by Salesforce, HubSpot, Sana, and Writer, while Superhuman’s recent sponsors include companies like HubSpot, Sana, and Writer — no Salesforce.

While Cheung’s newsletter is mostly A.I. boosterism with sponsorships, there is a block near the end of each issue for a sibling product: the Rundown University. The first thing you need to know about it is that it is not a university, obviously. It is online training through individual “courses” offered at $50 apiece with individual lessons on using A.I. tools, some of which — like Gamma and Zapier — happen to have sponsored of the newsletter. Or, if you want access to all the “courses” plus workshops, tutorials, and some kind of group chat, you can get all that for just a penny shy of $1,000 per year. Just above the footer sits a carousel of inspirational quotes about A.I. from people like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, and Elon Musk. None are actually specific to Rundown “University”, just vibes about the importance of A.I. and its impact. It all feels a bit much.

I am fascinated by the knock-on effects of a hype cycle, and A.I. has produced some magnificent examples — including those above. It is illuminating to search Google for a phrase like intitle:"how" intitle:"is using ai to" and witnessing what is ostensibly breathtaking innovation across industries. A 2023 Guardian story says the “oldest surviving newspaper in the world” — untrue and in spirit only — is using ChatGPT to generate articles from council meeting minutes. According to the Harvard Business Review, construction companies are using large language models to, among other things, summarize documents. Stitch Fix is, according to a disguised ad in Vogue Business, using A.I. to detect trends.

There are countless examples of articles like these illustrating how companies are benefitting from the glow of hype while contributing to it. None of this is to say it is necessarily unearned — maybe detecting money laundering really is more reliable when you run it through A.I. processes. But I remember stories like these in the days when the hot new thing was called “machine learning” or, before that, “big data”. I would not be surprised if these technologies are truly beneficial yet it is hard not to feel the weight of hype and the marketing people behind it all.

Bluesky Verification Is Decentralized in Theory steveklabnik.com

Steve Klabnik:

The underlying [verification] protocol is totally open, but you can make an argument that most users will use the main client, and therefore, in practice it’s more centralized than not. My mental model of it is the bundled list of root CAs that browsers ship; in theory, DNS is completely decentralized, but in practice, a few root CAs are more trusted than others. It’s sort of similar here, except there’s no real “delegation” involved: verifiers are peers, not a tree.

This core design allows Bluesky to adjust the way it works in the future fairly easily, they could allow you to decide who to trust, for example. We’ll see how this feature evolves over time.

The way Bluesky described verification made it sound like a centralized service, but it is not. I have corrected my post.

Bluesky Adds Verification Badges bsky.social

In a post attributed to the Bluesky Team, the company announced a familiar verification method with a twist:

In 2023, we launched our first layer of verification: letting individuals and organizations set their domain as their username. Since then, over 270,000 accounts have linked their Bluesky username to their website. Domain handles continue to be an important part of verification on Bluesky. At the same time, we’ve heard from users that a larger visual signal would be useful in knowing which accounts are authentic.

Now, we’re introducing a new layer — a user-friendly, easily recognizable blue check. Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue check next to their names. Additionally, through our Trusted Verifiers feature, select independent organizations can verify accounts directly. Bluesky will review these verifications as well to ensure authenticity.

The domain-based verification Bluesky already implemented was a good start, but incomplete. My profile is connected to my personal domain but, even with that single line of text, there is no obvious indicator. You can see the problem on Bluesky’s own profile which tells you to “check username👆” to confirm it is, indeed, the real one.

Then there is the problem of public personalities. Maybe a musician or actor wants to confirm their profile is really them, but is domain-based verification really the best way for them? Does Pedro Pascal have a dot-com? What about a journalist who could “verify” an account connected to an employer, but they also want a separate personal account? Both ought to be verified, but only one is employer-connected. Then, when they leave that employer, they will need to change their username, and Bluesky does not automatically redirect moved profiles. (Followers, posts, and so forth are moved to the new profile, but any links to posts made under the previous profile are not redirected.)

A verification checkmark is not an offensive idea unto itself, but it comes with a new set of concerns. First, what does it mean? Bluesky says it is for “authentic and notable accounts”, but what that means is not clear. Twitter used to assign itself an authoritative role in determining which accounts fit similar criteria. In doing so, it helped make this badge a bizarre mark of status. Now, Meta and X let you simply buy a badge to confirm an account belongs to the person or organization claimed. If the goal is to avoid controversy with notable figures, surely self-verification and manual profile confirmation achieve those purposes. But a parody account is also legitimate in its own way, right?

Second, while it makes sense to have a quick identifier of accounts susceptible to impersonation, the badge also comes with risks. If such an account is hijacked, for example, its posts carry additional weight.

Bluesky seems like it is trying to solve some of these issues by allowing others to vouch for the authenticity of an account. In theory, this minimizes its own role in being the voice of authority. In its example, the New York Times’ account can verify the authenticity of others’ accounts. But Bluesky still plays a central role in this process — it appears to determine whether an account can become a Trusted Verifier, and its moderators confirm each verification request from third-party verifiers. I take it this latter requirement is necessary because it is not clear to me whether there are any limits to which accounts a Trusted Verifier can approve. Still, it means Bluesky is the final say in which accounts belong to the person or organization claimed.

Update: I was wrong, according to Bluesky technical advisor Jeremy Johnson:

anyone can publish a verify record, any app can choose who to display verifies from. And as this thing bakes a bit we’re going to make it easier to pick different verifiers in our app.

If you were to run your own app view then you definitely don’t have to care at all what Bluesky PBC does here, just collect all the app.bsky.graph.verification records and go ham.

It sounds like I could verify my own accounts — or, indeed, vouch for any account — but it is up to the client how it wants to display that verification attempt. Bluesky itself is only trusting itself and select others for now.

The Charm of Movie Mistakes fxrant.blogspot.com

Todd Vaziri:

I’m particularly obsessed with moments that reveal the craft and artistry of the magic trick of a shot that slightly shatters the illusion of cinema. These revealing moments have been in movies since the dawn of cinema, and are everywhere (if you know exactly where to look).

I have always loved spotting “mistakes” in movies. Not from the perspective of ha ha, you messed up, but more because of exactly what Vaziri describes here: they show the little moments of craft. These ones are charming.

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Apple’s Rebranded Apple Ads Probably Forecasts More Advertising digiday.com

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple today announced that it has officially rebranded Search Ads as ‘Apple Ads’, reflecting the expanding scope of Apple’s advertising business.

When Apple first launched ads in the App Store, they were only shown as promoted search results, hence the name ‘Search Ads’. But the company now offers advertising placements in many more places beyond just the Search tab, so the old name had become a bit anachronistic.

Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon, Digiday:

The timing matters. Apple has spent years building its defenses, designing its own chips, overhauling supply chains — but tariffs on Chinese imports, especially under Trump’s return to the campaign trail, are reintroducing uncertainty. Some products have dodged the impact, others haven’t. And with hardware margins already tight, Apple needs new ways to protect its bottom line.

I do not think it is nitpicking to dispute calling margins of 35% on hardware “tight”.

Still, Apple is at risk of being squeezed in both hardware and software — to the extent a corporation the size of Apple can actually be squeezed, of course. Its hardware made in China is now exempt from Trump’s escalating and volatile tariff demands, but that could obviously change if Tim Cook is insufficiently grateful. Meanwhile, its Google search deal with 100% margins is at risk of being disallowed.

The advertising market is an obvious but dispiriting place to find money. Apple already has a few spots available in the App Store, and in News and Stocks, and I could see the potential for placements in apps like Maps, Music, Podcasts, and Wallet.

This rebranding and the increasingly important Services revenue charts look like a forecast for more ads. I hope I am wrong. I do not use News or Stocks, but the ads in the App Store are already a gross exploitation of Apple’s position owning these platforms. It is the kind of move that encourages understandable regulatory scrutiny.

Microsoft Is Bringing Recall Back to Windows arstechnica.com

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly.

Kevin Beaumont:

After a bunch of discussions with a bunch of folks, it’s pretty clear there’s been zero published research on Copilot Recall in almost a year – all the news articles have just reprinted Microsoft’s talking points saying it is secure now.

Beaumont says there are improvements to the onboarding process and security, but also found there is still no way for applications to opt out of being recorded, and it still captures private information like Signal chats and credit card numbers. Oh, and Beaumont may have found the decryption key. I see the utility in a feature like this, but I am not sure that outweighs the risks for the user or anyone they communicate with.

Google Loses Online Advertising Monopoly Case axios.com

Scott Rosenberg and Sara Fischer, Axios:

Google’s dominance of the online advertising and ad-tech markets violates U.S. antitrust laws, a federal court ruled Thursday, in a decision that could scramble the massive digital ad universe.

[…]

The court drew a distinction between the markets for advertising exchanges and ad servers, where it found Google has an illegal monopoly, and the general market for display ads online, where it found Google does not.

Emma Roth and Lauren Feiner, the Verge:

“We won half of this case and we will appeal the other half,” Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement to The Verge. “The Court found that our advertiser tools and our acquisitions, such as DoubleClick, don’t harm competition. We disagree with the Court’s decision regarding our publisher tools. Publishers have many options and they choose Google because our ad tech tools are simple, affordable and effective.”

If the conclusion of this case is held after what I assume will be a lengthy and expensive appeals process, the corrections for this and Google’s illegal search monopoly will have a noticeable effect on the web.

Bluesky, Censorship, and Country-Based Moderation fediversereport.com

Laurens Hof, the Fediverse Report:

There is a technical story, of how Bluesky and the AT Protocol (ATProto) do composable moderation for specific countries. But this is not just an interesting technology, it has implications of government censorship more broadly. Not only is the Turkish censorship of accounts even easier to sidestep, it also allows for new ways to highlight and create visibility for the content that the Turkish government wants to be hidden. To explain how that all works, first a closer look at how moderation works on Bluesky.

I understand why some would disagree with Bluesky’s approach and prefer the way of Mastodon. But I do not think Bluesky’s handling is invalid or necessarily inferior — just different.

MITRE Makes CVE Program Independent After U.S. Government Funding Expires krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today [April 15] that its contract to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program — which is traditionally funded each year by the Department of Homeland Security — expires on April 16.

[…]

Update, April 16, 11:00 a.m. ET: The CVE board today announced the creation of non-profit entity called The CVE Foundation that will continue the program’s work under a new, unspecified funding mechanism and organizational structure.

I do not love how I am learning how many critical things worldwide are dependent on an increasingly unstable U.S. government.

Lyft Texted a Rider a Transcript of the Conversation She Had in a Car cbc.ca

Nicole Brockbank, CBC News:

Anvi Ahuja noticed a “freaky” new text message from a number she didn’t know right after getting back to her downtown Toronto apartment last month.

The text was a transcript of the conversation she’d just had with her roommates during their eight-minute Lyft ride home from a friend’s place.

[…]

The company confirms the incident took place, but has offered varying explanations.

None of Lyft’s explanations make sense to me. Bizarre and creepy.

Meta’s Poor Prebuttal to “Careless People”

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Meta’s leadership team found out about Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book “Careless People”. This conversation could have taken place anywhere, but I imagine it was in a glass-walled meeting room which would allow one of these millionaire’s shouted profanities to echo. That feels right. Wynn-Williams, a former executive at Facebook, is well-placed to tell stories of the company’s indifference to user privacy, its growth-at-all-costs mentality, its willingness to comply with the surveillance and censorship requirements of operating in China, and alleged sexual harassment by Joel Kaplan. And, of course, its inaction in Myanmar that played a “determining role” in a genocide that killed thousands in one month in 2017 alone.

Based on some of the anecdotes in this book, I am guessing Zuckerberg, Kaplan, and others learned about this from a public relations staffer. That is how they seem to learn about a lot of pretty important things. The first public indication this book was about to be released came in the form of a preview in the Washington Post. Apparently, Meta had only found out about it days before.

It must have been a surprise as Meta’s preemptive response came in the form of a barely formatted PDF sent to Semafor, and it seems pretty clear the company did not have an advance copy of the book because all of its rebuttals are made in broad strokes against the general outline reported by the Post. Now that I have read the book, I thought it would be fun and educational to compare Meta’s arguments against the actual claims Wynn-Williams makes. I was only half right — reading about the company’s role in the genocide in Myanmar remains a chilling exercise.

A caveat: Wynn-Williams’ book is the work of a single source — it is her testimony. Though there are references to external documents, there is not a single citation anywhere in the thing. In an article critical of the book, Katie Harbath, one of Wynn-Williams’ former colleagues, observes how infrequently credit is given to others. And it seems like it, as with most non-fiction books, was not fact-checked. That is not to disparage the book or its author, but only to note that this is one person’s recollections centred around her own actions and perspective.

One other caveat: I have my own biases against Meta. I think Mark Zuckerberg is someone who had one good idea and has since pretended to be a visionary while stumbling between acquisitions and bad ideas. Meta’s services are the product of bad incentives, an invasive business model, and a caustic relationship with users. I am predisposed to embracing a book validating those feelings. I will try to be fair.

Anyway, the first thing you will notice is that most of the points in Meta’s response do not dispute the stories Wynn-Williams tells; instead, the company wants everyone to think it is all “old news” and it resents all this stuff being dredged up again. Yet even though this is apparently a four-hundred-page rehash, Meta is desperate to silence Wynn-Williams in a masterful gambit. But of course Wynn-Williams is going to write about things we already know a little bit about; even so, there is much to learn.

Most of Meta’s document is dedicated to claims about the company’s history with China, beginning with the non-news that it wanted to expand into the country:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Had A Desire To Operate In China.

Old News:

Zuckerberg Addressed This In 2019 Televised Speech. Mark himself said in a televised address in 2019, “[He] wanted our services in China … and worked hard to make this happen. But we could never come to agreement on what it would take for us to operate there.’ That is why we don’t operate our services in China today.”

No, it is not just you: the link in this section is, indeed, broken, and has been since this document was published, even though the page title suggests it was available six months prior. Meta’s communications staff must have known this because they include a link to the transcript, too. No, I cannot imagine why Meta thought it made sense to send people to an inactive video.

At any rate, Zuckerberg’s speech papers over the lengths to which the company and he — personally — went to ingratiate himself with leaders in China. Wynn-Williams dedicates many pages of her book to examples, but only one I want to focus on for now.

But let me begin with the phrase “we could never come to an agreement on what it would take for us to operate there”. In the context of this speech’s theme, the importance of free expression, this sounds like Meta had a principled disagreement with the censorship required of a company operating in China. This was not true. Which brings me to another claim Meta attempts to reframe:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Developed Censorship Tools For Use By Chinese Officials.

Old News:

2016 New York Times Report On Potential Facebook Software Being Used By Facebook In Regard To China; Noted It “So Far Gone Unused, And There Is No Indication That Facebook Has Offered It To The Authorities In China.” […]

This is not a denial.

Wynn-Williams says she spent a great deal of time reading up on Facebook’s strategy in China since being told to take it over on a temporary basis in early 2017. Not only was the company okay with censoring users’ posts on behalf of the Chinese government, it viewed the capability as leverage and built software to help. She notices in one document “the ‘key’ offer is that Facebook will help China ‘promote safe and secure social order'”:

I find detailed content moderation and censorship tools. There would be an emergency switch to block any specific region in China (like Xinjiang, where the Uighurs are) from interacting with Chinese and non-Chinese users. Also an “Extreme Emergency Content Switch” to remove viral content originating inside or outside China “during times of potential unrest, including significant anniversaries” (like the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests and subsequent repression).

Their censorship tools would automatically examine any content with more than ten thousand views by Chinese users. Once this “virality counter” got built, the documents say that Facebook deployed it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it’s been running on every post.

Far from a principled “agreement on what it would take for us to operate [in China]”, Facebook was completely fine with the requirements of the country’s censorial regime until it became more of a liability. Then, it realized it was a better deal to pay lobbyists to encourage the U.S. government to ban TikTok.

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Tested Stealth App In China.

Old News:

2017 New York Times Headline: “In China, Facebook Tests The Waters With A Stealth App” “We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country in different ways,” Facebook said in a statement.”

Wynn-Williams provides plenty more detail than is contained in the Times report. I wish I could quote many pages of the book without running afoul of copyright law or feeling like a horrible person, so here is a brief summary: Facebook created an American shell company, which spun up another shell company in China. Meta moved one of its employees to an unnamed “Chinese human resources company” and makes her the owner of its Chinese shell company. A subsidiary of that company then launched two lightly reskinned Facebook apps in China, which probably violate Chinese data localization laws. And I need to quote the next part:

“Are Mark and Sheryl okay with it?” I ask.

He [Kaplan] admits that they weren’t aware of it.

I am unsure I believe Zuckerberg did not know about this arrangement.

As far as I can find, most of these details are new. The name of the Chinese shell company’s subsidiary was published by the Times, but the only reference I can find — predating this book — to the other shell companies is in an article on Sohu. I cannot find any English-language coverage of this situation.

Nor, it should be said, can I find any discussion of the legality of Facebook’s Chinese operations, the strange leadership in the documentation for the shell companies, the other apps Facebook apparently released in China, and the fallout after the Times article was published. Meta’s anticipatory response to Wynn-Williams’ book pretends none of this is newsworthy. I found it captivating.

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Chinese Dissident Guo Wengui Was Removed Due To Pressure From The Chinese Government.

Old News:

The Reasons Facebook Removed Guo Wengui From The Platform Were Publicly Reported In 2017;

Unpublished His Page And Suspended His Profile Because Of Repeated Violations Of Company’s Community Standards.

Wynn-Williams says this is false. She quotes the same testimony Facebook’s general counsel gave before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, but only after laying out the explicit discussions between Facebook and the Cyberspace Administration of China saying the page needed to be removed. At a time when Facebook was eager to expand into China, the company’s compliance was expected.

Then we get to Myanmar:

SWW’s “New” Claim:

Facebook Dragged Its Feet On Myanmar Services.

Old News:

Facebook Publicly Acknowledged Myanmar Response In 2018. The facts here have been public record since 2018, and we have said publicly we know we were too slow to act on abuse on our services in Myanmar […]

“Too slow to act” is one way to put it — phrasing that, while not absolving Meta, obscures a more offensive reality.

Myanmar, Wynn-Williams writes, was a particularly good market for Facebook’s Free Basics program, a partnership with local providers that gives people free access to services like Facebook and WhatsApp, plus a selection of other apps and websites. It is an obvious violation of net neutrality principles, the kind Zuckerberg framed in terms of civil rights in the United States, but seemed to find more malleable in India. Wynn-Williams’ description of the company’s campaign to save it in India, one that was ultimately unsuccessful, is worth reading on its own. Facebook launched Free Basics in Myanmar in 2016; two years later, the company pulled the plug.

From 2014 to 2017, Kevin Roose reported for the New York Times, Facebook’s user base in Myanmar — a country of around fifty million people — grew from two million to thirty million, surely accelerated by Free Basics. During that time period, Wynn-Williams writes, Facebook observed a dramatic escalation in hate speech directed toward the Rohingya group. As this began, Meta had a single contractor based in Dublin who was reviewing user reports. One person.

Also, according to Wynn-Williams, Facebook is not available in Burmese, local users “appear to be using unofficial Facebook apps that don’t offer a reporting function”, and there incompatibility between Unicode and Zawgyi. As a result, fewer reports are received, they are not necessarily in a readable format, and they are processed by one person several time zones away.

Leading up to the November 2015 election, Wynn-Williams says they doubled the number of moderators speaking Burmese — two total — plus another two for election week. Wynn-Williams says she worked for more than a year to get management’s attention in a candidate for Myanmar-specific policies, only for Kaplan to reject the idea in early 2017.

From the end of August to the end of September that year, 6,700 people are killed. Hundreds of thousands more are forced to leave the country. All of this was accelerated by Facebook’s inaction and ineptitude. “Too slow to act” hardly covers how negligent Facebook was at the scale of this atrocity.

SWW’s New Claim:

Facebook Offered Advertisers The Ability To Target Vulnerable 13-17 Year Olds.

Old News:

Claim Was Based On A 2017 Article By The Australian, Which Facebook Refuted. “On May 1, 2017, The Australian posted a story regarding research done by Facebook and subsequently shared with an advertiser. The premise of the article is misleading. Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state.”

In fact, Wynn-Williams quotes the refutation, calling it a “flat-out lie”. She says this is one of at least two similar slide decks discussing targeting ads based on a teenager’s emotional state, and in an internal discussion, finds an instance where Facebook apparently helped target beauty ads to teenage girls when they deleted pictures of themselves from their accounts. She also writes that the deputy chief privacy officer confirmed it is entirely possible to target ads based on implied emotion.

After the “lie” is released as a statement anyway, Wynn-Williams says she got a phone call from a Facebook ad executive frustrated by how it undermined their pitch to advertisers for precise targeting.

SWW’s New Claim:

Donald Trump Was Charged Less Money For Incendiary Adverts Which Reached More People.

Old News:

Claim Was Based On A 2018 Article By Wired, Which Facebook Refuted.

The argument made by Meta’s Andrew Bosworth, in a since-deleted Twitter thread, was that Trump’s average CPM was almost always higher than that of the Clinton campaign. But while this is one interpretation of the Wired article — one the publication disputed — this is not the claim made by Wynn-Williams. She only says the high levels of engagement on Trump’s ads drove their prices down, but not necessarily less than Clinton’s ads.

Those were all of the claims Meta chose to preemptively dispute or reframe. The problem is that Wynn-Williams did make news in this book. There are plenty of examples of high-level discussions, including quoted email messages, showing the contemporaneous mindset to build its user base and market share no matter the cost. It is ugly. Meta’s public relations team apparently thought it could get in front of this thing without having all the details, but their efforts were weak and in vain.

Following its publication, Meta not only sought and received a legal demand that Wynn-Williams must stop talking about the book, it followed its “playbook for answering whistleblowers”. I am not a highly paid public relations person; I assume those who are might be able to explain if this strategy is effective. It does not seem as though it is, however.

This is all very embarrassing for Meta, yet seems entirely predictable. Like I wrote, I have my own biases against the company. I already thought it was a slimy company and I hate how much this confirms my expectations. So I think it is important to stay skeptical. Perhaps there are other sides to these stories. But nothing in “Careless People” seems unbelievable — only unseemly and ugly.

The Acquisition of Instagram Made Sense to Facebook Even at the Time nytimes.com

Mike Isaac, New York Times:

In 2012, when Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles.

“A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show. “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?”

Mr. Stewart called the decision “really lame.” His audience — and much of the rest of the world — agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had overpaid for an app that highlighted a bunch of photo filters.

While Stewart’s bit remains funny, I must again note that many people with actual expertise in this area treated the acquisition as a reasonable cost to neutralize a surging competitor.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Takes on Meta nytimes.com

Cecilia Kang, Mike Isaac, and David McCabe, New York Times:

The case against Meta could affect its 3.5 billion users, who on average log on to Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp multiple times a day for news, shopping and texting. Instagram and WhatsApp have attracted more users in recent years as Facebook, Meta’s flagship app, has stopped growing.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.

Lily Jamali, BBC News:

Meta countered that the lawsuit from the FTC, which reviewed and approved those acquisitions, is “misguided.”

Meta “acquired Instagram and WhatsApp to improve and grow them alongside Facebook,” the company’s attorney Mark Hansen argued.

To my layperson’s eyes, this does not seem like a counterpoint to the FTC’s arguments as much as it is a reframing of them.

Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer:

In order for the FTC to win this case, they need to prove both that Meta has a dominant share in a properly defined product market that includes all competitors, and that the two acquisitions harmed competition and consumers. They are wrong on both claims. That’s why they’ve gerrymandered a fictitious market in which Facebook and Instagram compete only with Snapchat and an app called MeWe. In reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram – if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.

This is going to be a fascinating trial. It seems clear based on evidence in emails, chats, and underhanded tactics that Instagram and WhatsApp were acquired to neutralize their competitive power. Yet we have no idea what the tech landscape of today would look like had both remained independent companies. Meta’s products still have competition from other social networks and, in theory, it must fight them for every user-minute and ad dollar. However, we know for certain Meta does not need to compete today against Instagram and WhatsApp.

Lawsuits Allege Trade Desk Secretly Breaks Privacy Laws adweek.com

Kendra Barnett, AdWeek:

Filed on March 31 in the Central District of California, one of the class action cases takes aim at The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) identifier, alleging that the tracking tech collects personally identifiable information, like email addresses and phone numbers, and uses it to enable user profiling and real-time bidding.

[…]

The Trade Desk, plaintiffs allege in this case, operates like a data broker as it tracks, profiles, and de-anonymizes internet users without their knowledge or consent via its Adsrvr Pixel, which follows users across different parts of the web and across devices.

I mentioned UID2 in passing a couple of years ago. The claims (PDF) in these lawsuits (PDF), untested in court, are certainly worrisome but only as much as any of these user identification and enrichment services. At least California has privacy laws to hold the Trade Desk accountable instead of relying on the Federal Trade Commission’s less direct processes.

How Record Store Day Became the Stupidest Day in Music defector.com

John Semley, Defector:

At a very basic level, commodity fetishism is fine, and probably pretty normal: a way of declaring, “Here is my stuff that I like.” It can be an expression not only of personal curatorial habits, but of taste, and identity. But commodities conceived along the line of Record Store Day exclusives push this to an extreme. Their use-value is practically nil. They are only commodities. And as far as statements of taste and identity go, they announce only “I am a big-time commodity fetishist!”

It is truly remarkable to me how pliable we all are even when we know these tactics. We know this is why smartphones come in different colours every year, and why there is the very notion of a “limited edition” even if that edition numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

To repurpose or recontextualize Goodhart’s law, when something becomes the product of attention, it will eventually lose the reason for that attention. Record Store Day began in good faith, which has been taken advantage of to, in 2025, sell Post Malone’s Nirvana livestream on vinyl for $37. Be quick — there are only seventeen thousand copies available.

Taking the User by the Reins rakhim.exotext.com

Rakhim Davletkaliyev:

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok — which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

There is an element of this critique that feels very now and may become outdated, as TikTok’s relevance could perhaps fade with time, but platforms wresting control from users and foisting decisions upon them is a long and ongoing trend. To wit, here is Davletkaliyev:

Even the “New” section [in Netflix] is meaningless. It opens with a “For You” row (huh?), then “Continue Watching”, followed by generic “Popular in ” rows. It feels like YouTube search: ask for something specific, get a few hits, and then a flood of unrelated “popular” and “recommended” content.

The screenshots preceding this paragraph show Netflix’s homepage in 2012. The subtitle on the page reads “Based on what you like, we’ve filled it with personalized suggestions JUST FOR YOU”. The first row of items is “Popular on Netflix”. These are superficially similar qualities to those Davletkaliyev complains about in Netflix today.

If you scratch a little deeper, I think the version today feels different for two reasons. First, Netflix has a lot more original media; instead of a page filled with movies and shows you recognize, it is now full of Netflix-branded material. Second, Netflix is just one of many services prioritizing recommendations and suggestions, and perhaps this feeling accumulates to the point where none seem to be serving our interests. Davletkaliyev’s other example is Spotify, but it could just as easily be Apple Music. I use it very simply, yet I feel as though I am fighting with its home screen. I have to use entirely separate apps — MusicHarbor and Record Club — to learn about new releases from my favourite artists. If I dip into one of the suggestions and then go back to the home screen, the whole thing usually refreshes and shows me entirely different suggestions. It is all just one big fight with large business interests.

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Post-Twitter Services as Covered by the New Yorker newyorker.com

Kyle Chayka, of the New Yorker, wrote a pretty good profile of Bluesky and its CEO Jay Graber recently which, as it turns out, is his third in what is now a set of articles about the post-Twitter services trio. On Mastodon in November 2022:

Users who want to have a lively, varied experience on Mastodon have to put in effort, too. On Twitter, you log in to your account and are immediately thrust into the melee of the “global town square,” for better or worse. On Mastodon, you can start accounts on as many servers as you like but you have to log on to each one in turn, as if each were its own separate social network. The server your account is hosted on is embedded in your username (mine is @chaykak@zirk.us) and becomes a kind of home base. Mastodon offers various feed configurations, from a “local” one that shows only posts from accounts on your server to a more bustling admixture of all the users you follow across any server. There’s a tool called Debirdify that can tell you which Twitter users you follow are already on Mastodon. But Mastodon’s built-in friction and fragmentation make it harder to communicate with many people at once. You can peer into servers you don’t belong to, like a curious tourist, but you won’t be able to post to their feeds.

This is a strange interpretation of how Mastodon works. It is technically correct but irrelevant; there is no need for someone to have accounts on multiple servers as they all communicate over the same protocol. You do not need a Gmail account to send a message to a Gmail user, for example. But I think it illustrates the perceived complexity of the service while, unfortunately, doing little to clarify it.

Do not get me wrong — I like Mastodon a lot. It is the post-Twitter service I use most often. But it reminds me a lot of something like Usenet or mailing lists while the others remind me of forums. It has a little more technical overhead and a few more quirks. If you are sent a link to a post on another server, for example, and you want to boost it, you have to go find it from your own server. It remains a clunky process.

Next up, Chayka wrote about Threads in July 2023, shortly after it launched:1

[…] It is currently impossible to see posts solely from followed accounts; Meta executives promise that a chronological feed is in the works, but, as on Facebook and Instagram, that feature is unlikely to be the default. As a result, much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter — posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians. The Threads feed rarely appears in a chronological order and often serves up disparate posts from the same account in a row.

Even though Meta has made many changes to Threads in the interim, it still feels like a pretty hollow place. Jon Passantino, of Status, attributes this “lifeless” feeling to “Meta’s antagonistic relationship with power users” — an “indifference toward those powering the platform”. Perhaps.

I think the problem is simpler: Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel. It has all the attitude of a corporate retreat and the energy of a midsize rental car. That is simply the vibe Meta brings. No amount of power users can change that.

Finally, on Bluesky. This is the second such article published by the New Yorker about the platform; the first was in May 2023, but that one was shorter and not by Chayka, so it does not fit the theme I am setting. Chayka:

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line — just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

A punk rock attitude is not really compatible with being a corporate executive — only to the detriment of the latter — yet Graber and Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko are the closest I have felt to that spirit. I hope I am not wrong about either of them. I feel like these two platforms can coexist without either one needing to win or become absorbed in the drama of the other. I am a little disappointed to read the two “discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol”. I think it is fine to keep them entirely separate, but it makes sense to me for the two to be compatible so long as they retain a spirit of openness and portability.


  1. This article ends:

    […] What I still miss is the dependable simplicity of Twitter, the digital Brutalism of two-hundred-and-forty-character bursts of news in a constant stream. Neither Twitter itself nor its competitors have lately been able to capture that energy.

    This appears to be a reference to Twitter’s character limit, but that was 140 characters before becoming 280. One could make the argument the latter character limit is inclusive of Chayka’s example, but that is clearly not what he is going for. One would think that is something the New Yorker’s famously rigorous fact-checkers would ask about. ↥︎

How Crawlers Impact the Operations of the Wikimedia Projects diff.wikimedia.org

Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis, and Giuseppe Lavagetto, of the Wikimedia Foundation:

Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.

Given the sheer volume of stuff scraped by A.I. companies, it is hard to say how much value any single source has in generating material in response to an arbitrary request. Wikimedia might be the exception, however. It is so central and its contents so expansive that it is hard to imagine many of these products would be nearly so successful without it.

I do not see the names of any of the most well-known A.I. companies among the foundation’s largest donors. Perhaps they are the seven anonymous donors in the $50,000-and-up group. I suggest they, at the very least, give more generously and openly.

Established Writers Are Making More Money After Leaving Substack digiday.com

Alexander Lee, Digiday:

A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

That these services are less expensive for writers is distinct from subscriber growth. Substack’s network is surely a subscription driver, but that becomes less important as a writer’s popularity grows and people begin spreading their work in other ways. Beehiiv and Ghost are a little more old-fashioned — which is not necessarily a bad thing: they focus on providing a specific service instead of trying to be a social media company. But that means more self-promotional efforts by less established writers.

Safari Technology Preview Supports a More Comprehensive Interpretation of ‘Pretty’ Text-Wrap webkit.org

I needed cheering up after the last post. Sorry about that.

Jen Simmons, of Apple’s WebKit team:

While support for pretty shipped in Chrome 117, Edge 177, and Opera 103 in Fall 2023, and Samsung Internet 24 in 2024, the Chromium version is more limited in what it accomplishes. According to an article by the Chrome team, Chromium only makes adjustments to the last four lines of a paragraph. It’s focused on preventing short last lines. It also adjusts hyphenation if consecutive hyphenated lines appear at the end of a paragraph.

The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps.

Where many in my profession get excited for new APIs to make web apps more capable, this is what brings me similar joy. Maybe more. I love to see any typography improvements on the web which I, in my finest fuddy-duddy fashion, still regard as a primarily document-based environment.

A ‘U.S.-Made iPhone’ is Pure Fantasy 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.

Apple itself is already attempting to make its manufacturing less dependent on factories in China, specifically, but it is a slow transformation over years, and not necessarily in a single direction. Notably, it is not moving production to the United States, instead working with Foxconn to build factories in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not only do these countries have lower labour costs and proximity to parts sourcing countries, they also have higher population densities permitting a greater workforce near a factory. Foxconn’s ridiculous con of a U.S. factory for “AI 8K+5G” was built on farmland outside a village outside Wisconsin’s fifth biggest city. Total population of the entire county: 197,727. That is less than the workforce of just one of Foxconn’s factories making iPhones.

Anyone who has spent time digging into the supply chains of just about any industry is probably similar parts amazed and disgusted by what they find, and rightfully so. It strains my ability to understand anything to know a device as precise as a smartphone can be made at scale, about as much as I am also baffled when I see Walmart selling a pair of jeans for less than $20. The only way this is possible is at a huge human cost. This happens far away and — in a way beneficial to the name brands involved — at third-party factories, subcontractors, or a component business deep in the supply chain. But this human exploitation is not relegated to over there; it happens closer to home too.

I think it is fair and correct to support greater diversification of manufacturing, including to rich countries. What bothers me is how much of the discussion I have seen concerns the dollar value of a hypothetical made-in-the-U.S. iPhone, and how little focuses on higher labour standards no matter where a product is made. Workers’ rights are not what U.S. tariffs are ultimately about. But the exploitation is ours. We, the richest countries in the world, go into developing nations and extract from their people and environment the products we want for the incredibly generous lifestyle we have. Some factory owners have become very rich in being able to meet our demands; many people have not. And then we just move on. Now the U.S. is punishing everyone around the world for partaking, necessarily, in an entrenched global system of trade. Maybe iPhones get more expensive later this year, and maybe that means we buy fewer. The human and environmental cost will be similar. But we will still buy them.

White House Investigation Implicates Siri Suggestions in ‘Signalgate’ theguardian.com

Hugo Lowell, the Guardian:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, [the Atlantic’s Jeffrey] Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of [Mike] Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

Then, when Waltz went to add Hughes to the Signal chat, so this goes, he instead added Goldberg. Presumably, this is related to Siri suggestions. This version of events sounds plausible to me, if a little too perfect, but stranger things have happened.

The distrustful and cynical voice deep inside me wants to think Waltz has been a source or contact for Goldberg, and that this is a neat way to keep that secret. There is no evidence for this. The White House’s explanation really does sound right. But try telling anyone they should trust the results of an internal investigation into one of the most dunderheaded security breaches in living memory — even surpassing the time when a couple of lawyers during the first Trump administration were blabbing within earshot of a New York Times reporter.

Sam Altman Wants to Give Himself a Handshake, Too techcrunch.com

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:

OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.

This feels less icky to me than the acquisition of X by xAI, but still the kind of thing that makes me tilt my head like a confused border collie.

Judge Says U.K Hearing Over Compromising iCloud Encryption Must Be Public bbc.com

Tom Singleton and Liv McMahon, BBC News:

The government argued it would damage national security if the nature of the legal action and the parties to it were made public — what are known as the “bare details of the case”.

In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal rejected that request — pointing to the extensive media reporting of the row and highlighting the legal principle of open justice.

“It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place,” it states.

The public copy of the ruling (PDF) is kind of funny to read because of the secrecy rules around the technical capability notice. Presumably, this judge would know whether Apple had been issued this demand, but cannot say so. They therefore extensively refer to media reporting about the demand; in response to a request from U.S. lawmakers, they write of “discuss[ing] an alleged technical capability notice”, emphasis my own.

Ultimately, this decision is a rare bit of good news in the world of secret orders and demands to compromise encryption. At least we will know something about how it all goes down, even if it is buried in the language of hypotheticals and non-denials.

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Facebook and Google Cancelled Their Attempts to Operate in China in the Same Year bbc.com

I would like to make an amendment to an article I published last month comparing the risks of popular U.S. technology companies with concerns previously reserved for those from China. I wrote:

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.

This is still true. But there is something else, too. The Foreign Affairs article I just linked to also mentions “Project Dragonfly”, Google’s attempt to build a China-friendly version of its search engine. News of this was broken in August 2018 by Ryan Gallagher of the Intercept.

Dragonfly was immediately condemned by Google employees and U.S. lawmakers. Sundar Pichai was hauled in front of members of the U.S. House of Representatives in December. But work continued in March 2019, and it was not until July that Google publicly confirmed it has ceased efforts.

I imagine the backlash would have spooked Facebook executives and could have been a factor in their own China project’s cancellation. But it is notable to me that both were terminated in the same year.

The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War foreignaffairs.com

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Foreign Affairs:

The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will want its own companies and platforms to build technological fortifications against its former ally and protector. Chinese firms will try to expand in Europe, too, although they may also face greater public skepticism. Either way, the end result will be lower profits, weakened American innovation, and a more isolated and insecure United States.

I think the writers are positioning this as an argument to policymakers and leadership at tech companies — note again where this was published — so they have chosen appealing arguments for that audience. The opening of the essay repeatedly hammers the threat to the U.S. tech hegemony, as though that is an inherently bad thing. Fear not: the rest of this essay is far more nuanced than this suggests.

Apple’s Price Stability daringfireball.net

John Gruber:

It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand. Throughout the entire COVID crisis, I don’t recall them changing their prices for anything.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at… $1299.

This very astute point makes the excuse of inflation stand out even more when prices are increased.

The Environmental Burden of the United States’ Bitcoin Mining Boom nature.com

Gianluca Guidi, et al., in a peer-reviewed article in Nature Communications:

[…] In this study, we located the 34 largest mines in the United States in 2022, identified the electricity-generating plants that responded to them, and pinpointed communities most harmed by Bitcoin mine-attributable air pollution. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity — 33% more than Los Angeles — 85% of which came from fossil fuels. […]

To borrow a phrase: yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we solved a lot of Sudokus to buy drugs. Hodl, and so forth.

Credit Card Insurance Is, in My Case, a Good Replacement for AppleCare

A little over a month ago, I had the misfortune of breaking both a fifteen-year record of intact phone screens and, relatedly, my phone’s screen. This sucked in part because I can no longer be so smug about not using a case, and also because I do not have AppleCare. I do have insurance coverage on my credit card. I had never gone through this process before, but it would turn out to be perfectly adequate.

There was some paperwork involved, of course. There was a fair bit of waiting, too. But I got paid in full for the repair. That is, while I had to put $450 up front, I ultimately paid nothing to fix my own accidental damage. For comparison, if I had purchased AppleCare when I got my iPhone 15 Pro, at $13.50 per month, it would have cost me over $240, plus $40 for the screen replacement itself.

I am not saying you should not buy AppleCare or extended warranties in general. Go bananas. In my case, I do not think it would have been worth $280 to save some paperwork and time.

This is also an example of how having a lower income makes everything cost more. There are usually minimum financial requirements for having a card with insurance like this, a level I thankfully meet. It allowed me to briefly shoulder the out-of-warranty repair cost and, ultimately, gave me a free repair. If I did not meet that threshold, I would have had to pay instalments of $13.50 just in case I dropped my phone. It does not seem right I paid nothing for this repair when someone earning less than I do would have paid so much.

Oracle Has Acknowledged Two Security Breaches in the Past Month bloomberg.com

Jake Bleiberg, Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. has told customers that a hacker broke into a computer system and stole old client log-in credentials, according to two people familiar with the matter. It’s the second cybersecurity breach that the software company has acknowledged to clients in the last month.

Here is one more excerpt from the Financial Times’ reporting of the proposed TikTok America ownership, which I linked to yesterday:

Oracle, co-founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison, would secure TikTok’s US data as part of the deal, people said.

Like poetry, these two stories were published on the same day. Sergiu Gatlan of Bleeping Computer broke the news of this Oracle breach last month.

FT: TikTok’s U.S. Business To Be Spun Off With ByteDance Retaining Nearly 20% Ownership ft.com

Hannah Murphy, et al., Financial Times:

Under the terms of the transaction, a group of new outside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone and other large private capital firms would own about half of TikTok’s US business, according to several people familiar with the matter. That US unit would be spun off from its Beijing-based parent ByteDance, these people said.

[…]

ByteDance would retain a stake at just below 20 per cent of the business, under the terms of the deal, in order to meet requirements in the US legislation that state that no more than a fifth be in the control of a “foreign adversary”.

A cool thing about this arrangement is how it will make everybody mad. ByteDance is still going to own a fifth of the business and it is possible, according to the Times, the U.S. business will still use its recommendation algorithm. But now the U.S. is also going to have majority ownership over one of TikTok’s most important and influential markets, continuing the dominance of U.S. social media companies. This solves nothing except the problem of a bunch of U.S. venture capitalists owning not enough stuff.

One question: will this cut off the U.S. version of TikTok from the rest of the world, exactly as the China-only Douyin is? Freedom, baby.

European Commission Takes Aim at End-to-End Encryption Again therecord.media

Alexander Martin, the Record:

Alongside the new Europol, the Commission said it would create roadmaps regarding both the “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and on encryption.

The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner, safeguarding cybersecurity and fundamental rights,” said the Commission. The identification of such solutions has been the subject of much controversy when attempted elsewhere.

The Commission has released no details yet, and it is hard to know what to expect given that what they want is — as experts keep pointing out — not possible. This keeps happening and the outcome is always a worry. Either lawmakers are going to permit end-to-end encryption, or they are not — with the “not” being a very wide range of compromises and backdoors, to outright criminalization.

Jason Snell’s Unsuccessful Journey Into Netflix’s Ad Tier sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly disruptive to the content of the show. It was never intended to be shown with advertising inserted mid-stream.

Netflix programmed four separate ad breaks.

In much the same way as the oner format shaped the story of “Adolescence”, ads defined TV shows. I remember how every show would use the ad breaks to create its structure. When movies were aired on broadcast TV, the addition of ad breaks felt entirely unnatural. The lack of advertising on the BBC, for example, similarly defined the storytelling format of its shows. If I were responsible for creating a show for Netflix, it would frustrate me to not know for certain whether it would be broken up by ads.

Also: my dentist’s office has TVs overhead and, today, the one above me was tuned to an Idaho Fox affiliate — not sure why; I thought we were “Canada strong” — playing “Sherri”. I have nothing against that show in particular, but I have not watched daytime TV in many years and the amount of ads shocked me. Near the end of the show, there would be minutes of ads — mostly for medical products — interspersed with short show segments: a minute-long game with an audience member; another minute-long bit with a funny family photo submitted by a viewer. These segments were not back-to-back; they were between multi-minute ad breaks which, at that point, are substantively the show. It was exhausting.

‘Large A.I. Models Are Cultural and Social Technologies’ henryfarrell.net

Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans, in an article for Science, as published on Farrell’s website because good academics are aware of how restrictive a paywalled journal can be:

Our central point here is not just that these technological innovations, like all other innovations, will have cultural and social consequences. Rather we argue that Large Models are themselves best understood as a particular type of cultural and social technology. They are analogous to such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies. Then we can ask the separate question about what the effects of these systems will be. New technologies that aren’t themselves cultural or social, such as steam and electricity, can have cultural effects. Genuinely new cultural technologies, Wikipedia for example, may have limited effects. However, many past cultural and social technologies also had profound, transformative effects on societies, for good and ill, and this is likely to be true for Large Models.

Some of the questions and discussions in this paper will be familiar. This framing, however, is unique and seems particularly thoughtful.

The Mediocrity of Modern Google om.co

Om Malik:

What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs. I remember when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first articulated their vision. I was introduced to them by one of their professors. Their clarity of purpose then makes today’s muddle all the more striking.

The multinational corporate equivalent of that Upton Sinclair quote you know.

I remember a time when tech companies felt like they actually had to work for their ability to exist. Now, they seem to take it largely for granted. As Malik writes, however, Google’s position may be more precarious than it seems, given how much of its revenue still depends on its search engine being the directory for the web.

French Competition Authority Fines Apple Over App Tracking Transparency autoritedelaconcurrence.fr

The Autorité de la concurrence:

The Autorité de la concurrence has fined Apple €150,000,000 for abusing its dominant position in the sector for the distribution of mobile applications on iOS and iPadOS devices between April 2021 and July 2023.

[…]

However, while the principle of the ATT framework is not problematic in terms of the likely benefits for users as regards privacy protection, the Autorité found that how the framework is implemented is abusive within the meaning of competition law, in particular as the implementation methods artificially complicate the use of third-party applications and distort the neutrality of the framework to the detriment of small publishers financed by advertising.

These regulators seemed particularly irritated (PDF) by how similar App Tracking Transparency is to GDPR requirements, without being fully aligned with them. Because the ATT prompt does not allow developers to specify which third-parties are receiving tracking data, developers must include a second opt-in screen that provides more details about how their data will be used. This is fairly granular — arguably too much — but Apple’s version lacks detail. If a user agrees to third-party tracking, is their consent fully informed if they do not know with which advertisers their information is being shared, or even how many? I am not sure they do.

They also seemed to disagree with how Apple defines tracking. German regulators are also interested in what amounts to self-preferencing, even if that is not Apple’s intent. The authority has not yet published the text of the decision, which will hopefully answer many of the questions I have.

One thing I am curious about is how the regulator reconciles Apple’s apparently “not problematic” attempts at improving user privacy with the callous disregard toward the same shown by ad tech companies. Trade groups representing those companies, including the French offices of the IAB and MMA, were among those who filed this complaint. Both trade groups are loathsome; their inability and failure to self-govern is one reason for this very privacy legislation. Yet Apple’s particular definition of “tracking” is something only relevant to very large platform operators like itself. There is very clearly a conflict of interest in Apple trying to apply these kinds of policies to competitors, especially as Apple expands its ads business.

John Gruber:

It’s clear that only one of these two things — Apple’s ATT or French/EU privacy regulations — was actually effective at reducing tracking: ATT. No one claimed that French or EU privacy laws resulted in Meta losing a fortune because they had to adjust their kleptomaniacal thievery of users’ privacy. But by all accounts, including Meta’s own, ATT cost Meta billions. And yes, ATT hurt small businesses too — small businesses that were built upon surreptitious tracking that users had neither awareness of nor control over. […]

I am not sure the available evidence supports this conclusion. In response to E.U. legislation and a record fine, Meta has introduced versions of Facebook and Instagram at a free tier with less personalized advertising — targeted only based on factors like a person’s age, gender, and the context of the ad — and a paid tier with no advertising at all. Depending on how many people opt into each tier, it may reduce Meta’s revenue. This, to me, sounds at least as productive as ATT, which had a mixed impact on ad tech companies like Meta. I am sure it cost the company money; I am equally sure it found new ways of figuring out how to target advertising based on the massive amount of personal information it continues to collect.

Smaller ad tech companies have not escaped regulators’ attention, either. Criteo, a French personalized advertising business, was fined €40 million in 2023 over privacy law violations. Orange was fined €50 million last year for a similar reason. Both are IAB members now on the winning side, as it were. Nobody looks good here.

I still believe both of these prompts are an inadequate solution that foists the burden of adequate privacy protections on end users. ATT and privacy legislation are two ways of approaching a similar problem. But one of these is operated by a massive private corporation with its own priorities taking a quasi-regulatory role, and it should be subject to governance with that in mind. I was optimistic about ATT; however, it is insufficient without strong privacy laws. I hope French authorities can settle this with Apple in a way that prioritizes users.

New Apple Intelligence Features and Languages apple.com

With the launch of iOS 18.4 today, Apple says Apple Intelligence features are now available in the E.U. and in several new languages. I remain skeptical that Apple Intelligence was ever “delayed” in the region. Until today, it was only available in variations of English. When Apple announced in November it would be bringing these features to the E.U., it sure seemed like it also needed the time to train its models on a range of new languages reflecting the regions where it would be used.

If Apple was so worried about the wrath of regulators, it could have made accessing Apple Intelligence in the E.U. as complicated as it does E.U.-specific features outside the region. But it did not.

There is also some new stuff in these updates:

This release also comes with additional Apple Intelligence features, including Priority Notifications to help users stay on top of time-sensitive communications, the ability to create a memory movie on Mac by simply typing a description, and an added Sketch style in Image Playground that creates academic and highly detailed sketches.

Cannot say I care at all about the latter two things, but Priority Notifications is at least an attempt to solve a problem I have long observed with the notifications system on iOS:

One of the reasons why using an iPhone has been so nice, for a decade now, is because of how little the user must manage it. The App Store gave even novice users the confidence to download new software, implicitly trusting that it would not cause problems on their phone or carry malware. You shouldn’t close open apps, either, and you don’t have to toggle Bluetooth or LTE to get great battery life. The system just sorts it out.

I want that same level of confidence with push notifications.

Since I wrote that in 2018, iOS notifications have improved dramatically. Notifications can now be grouped, for example, or batched into a group of morning and evening updates. Do Not Disturb has become more granular with the introduction of Focus Modes, too. I use those features extensively.

Priority Notifications is another way to balance the number and type of notifications you receive. Like many of the Apple Intelligence features — or, indeed, A.I. features as a whole — it is imperfect. But it is a truly welcome improvement for how I use notifications on my phone.

Elon Musk Gives Himself a Handshake bloomberg.com

Kurt Wagner and Katie Roof, Bloomberg:

Elon Musk said his xAI artificial intelligence startup has acquired the X platform, which he also controls, at a valuation of $33 billion, marking a surprise twist for the social network formerly known as Twitter.

This feels like it has to be part of some kind of financial crime, right? Like, I am sure it is not; I am sure this is just a normal thing businesses do that only feels criminal, like how they move money around the world to avoid taxes.

Wagner and Roof:

The deal gives the new combined entity, called XAI Holdings, a value of more than $100 billion, not including the debt, according to a person familiar with the arrangement, who asked not to be identified because the terms weren’t public. Morgan Stanley was the sole banker on the deal, representing both sides, other people said.

For perspective, that is around about the current value of Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto — one of the world’s largest mining businesses — and Starbucks. All of those companies make real products with real demand — unfortunately so, in the case of the first. xAI has exactly one external customer today. And it is not like unpleasant social media seems to be a booming business.

Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch, New York Times:

This month, X continued to struggle to hit its revenue targets, according to an internal email seen by The New York Times. As of March 3, X had served $91 million of ads this year, the message said, well below its first-quarter target of $153 million.

This is including the spending of several large advertisers. For comparison, in the same quarter in the pre-Musk era, Twitter generated over a billion dollars in advertising revenue.

I am begging for Matt Levine to explain this to me.

Apple’s Missteps in A.I. Are Partly the Fault of A.I. cnn.com

Allison Morrow, CNN:

Tech columnists such as the New York Times’ Kevin Roose have suggested recently that Apple has failed AI, rather than the other way around.

“Apple is not meeting the moment in AI,” Roose said on his podcast, Hard Fork, earlier this month. “I just think that when you’re building products with generative AI built into it, you do just need to be more comfortable with error, with mistakes, with things that are a little rough around the edges.”

To which I would counter, respectfully: Absolutely not.

Via Dan Moren, of Six Colors:

The thesis of the piece is not about excusing Apple’s AI missteps, but zooming out to take a look at the bigger picture of why AI is everywhere, and make the argument that maybe Apple is well-served by not necessarily being on the cutting edge of these developments.

If that is what this piece is arguing, I do not think Apple makes a good case for it. When it launched Apple Intelligence, it could have said it was being more methodical, framing a modest but reliable feature set as a picture of responsibility. This would be a thin layer of marketing speak covering the truth, of course, but that would at least set expectations. Instead, what we got was a modest and often unreliable feature set with mediocre implementation, and the promise of a significantly more ambitious future that has been kicked down the road.

These things do not carry the Apple promise, as articulated by Morrow, of “design[ing] things that are accessible out of the box”, products for which “[y]ou will almost never need a user manual filled with tiny print”. It all feels flaky and not particularly nice to use. Even the toggle to turn it off is broken.

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Meta Adds ‘Friends’ Tab to Facebook to Show Posts From Users’ Friends about.fb.com

Meta:

Formerly a place to view friend requests and People You May Know, the Friends tab will now show your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays and friend requests.

You know, I think this concept of showing people things they say they want to see might just work.

Meta says this is just one of “several ‘O.G.’ Facebook experiences [coming] throughout the year” — a truly embarrassing sentence. But Mark Zuckerberg said in an autumn earnings call that Facebook would “add a whole new category of content which is A.I. generated or A.I. summarized content, or existing content pulled together by A.I. in some way”. This plan is going just great. I think the way these things can be reconciled is exactly how Facebook is doing it: your friends go in a “Friends” tab, but you will see all the other stuff it wants to push on you by default. Just look how Meta has done effectively the same thing in Instagram and Threads.

The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson in November 2023:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates. What people should be wishing for are the two years of stability and bug fixes that occurred after the release of Snow Leopard. But I fear we’ll never see that again with Tim Cook in charge.

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember:

It’s an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was no exception, of course. The next major update, Mac OS X 10.7.0, was no exception either, and it was much buggier than 10.6.8 v1.1, even though both versions were released in the same week.

What I desperately miss is that period of stability after a few rounds of bug fixes. As I have previously complained about, my iMac cannot run any version of MacOS newer than Ventura, released in 2022. It is still getting bug and security fixes. In theory, this should mean I am running a solid operating system despite missing some features.

It is not. Apple’s engineering efforts quickly moved toward shipping MacOS Sonoma in 2023, and then Sequoia last year. It seems as though any bug fixes were folded into these new major versions and, even worse, new bugs were introduced late in the Ventura release cycle that have no hope of being fixed. My iMac seizes up when I try to view HDR media; because this Extended Dynamic Range is an undocumented enhancement, there is no preference to turn it off. Recent Safari releases have contained several bugs related to page rendering and scrolling. Weather sometimes does not display for my current location.

Ventura was by no means bug-free when it shipped, and I am disappointed even its final form remains a mess. My MacBook Pro is running the latest public release of MacOS Sequoia and it, too, has new problems late in its development cycle; I reported a Safari page crashing bug earlier this week. These are on top of existing problems, like how there is no way to change the size of search results’ thumbnails in Photos.

Alas, I am not expecting many bugs to be fixed. It is, after all, nearly April, which means there are just two months until WWDC and the first semi-public builds of another new MacOS version. I am hesitant every year to upgrade. But it does not appear much effort is being put into the maintenance of any previous version. We all get the choice of many familiar bugs, or a blend of hopefully fewer old bugs plus some new ones.

The New Substack Universe nymag.com

Remember when Substack’s co-founders went to great lengths to explain what they had built was little more than infrastructure? It was something they repeated earlier this year:

You need to have your own corner of the internet, a place where you can build a home, on your own land, with assets you control.

Our system gives creators ownership. With Substack, you have your own property to build on: content you own, a URL of your choosing, a website for your work, and a mailing list of your subscribers that you can export and take with you at any time.

This is a message the company reinforces because it justifies a wildly permissive environment for posters that requires little oversight. But it is barely more true that Substack is “your own land, with assets you control” than, say, a YouTube channel. The main thing Substack has going for it is that you can export a list of subscribers’ email accounts. Otherwise, the availability of your material remains subject to Substack’s priorities and policies.

What Substack in fact offers, and what differentiates it from a true self-owned “land”, is a comprehensive set of media formats and opportunities for promotion.

Charlotte Klein, New York magazine:

Substack today has all of the functionalities of a social platform, allowing proprietors to engage with both subscribers (via the Chat feature) or the broader Substack universe in the Twitter-esque Notes feed. Writers I spoke to mentioned that for all of their reluctance to engage with the Notes feature, they see growth when they do. More than 50 percent of all subscriptions and 30 percent of paid subscriptions on the platform come directly from the Substack network. There’s been a broader shift toward multimedia content: Over half of the 250 highest-revenue creators were using audio and video in April 2024, a number that had surged to 82 percent by February 2025.

Substack is now a blogging platform with email capabilities, a text-based social platform, a podcasting platform, and a video host — all of which can be placed behind a paywall. This is a logical evolution for the company. But please do not confuse this with infrastructure. YouTube can moderate its platform as it chooses and so can Substack. The latter has decided to create a special category filled to the brim with vaccine denialism publications that have “tens of thousands of paid subscribers”, from which Substack takes ten percent of earnings.

Public Figures Keep Leaving Their Venmo Accounts Public wired.com

The high-test idiocy of a senior U.S. politician inviting a journalist to an off-the-record chat planning an attack on Yemen, killing over thirty people and continuing a decade of war, seems to have popularized a genre of journalism dedicated to the administration’s poor digital security hygiene. Some of these articles feel less substantial; others suggest greater crimes. One story feels like deja vu.

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, Wired:

The Venmo account under [Mike] Waltz’s name includes a 328-person friend list. Among them are accounts sharing the names of people closely associated with Waltz, such as [Walker] Barrett, formerly Waltz’s deputy chief of staff when Waltz was a member of the House of Representatives, and Micah Thomas Ketchel, former chief of staff to Waltz and currently a senior adviser to Waltz and President Donald Trump.

[…]

One of the most notable appears to belong to [Susie] Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted political advisers. That account’s 182-person friend list includes accounts sharing the names of influential figures like Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and Hope Hicks, Trump’s former White House communications director.

In 2021, reporters for Buzzfeed News found Joe Biden’s Venmo account and his contacts. Last summer, the same Wired reporters plus Andrew Couts found J.D. Vance’s and, in February, reporters for the American Prospect found Pete Hegseth’s. It remains a mystery to me why one of the most popular U.S. payment apps is this public.

The War on Encryption Is Dangerous ft.com

Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal — which has recently been in the news — in an op-ed for the Financial Times:

The UK is part and parcel of a dangerous trend that threatens the cyber security of our global infrastructures. Legislators in Sweden recently proposed a law that would force communication providers to build back door vulnerabilities. France is poised to make the same mistake when it votes on the inclusion of “ghost participants” in secure conversations via back doors. “Chat control” legislation haunts Brussels.

There is some good news: French legislators ultimately rejected this provision.

WWDC 2025 Announced developer.apple.com

Like those since 2020, WWDC 2025 appears to be an entirely online event with a one-day in-person event. While it is possible there will be live demos — I certainly hope that is the case — I bet it is a two-hour infomercial again.

If you are planning on travelling there and live outside the United States, there are some things you should know and precautions you should take, particularly if you are someone who is transgender or nonbinary. It is a good thing travel is not required, and hopefully Apple will once again run labs worldwide.

You Are Just a Guest on Meta’s A.I.-Filled Platforms 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.

[…]

“Brute force” is not just what I have noticed while reporting on the spammers who flood Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google with AI-generated spam. It is the stated strategy of the people getting rich off of AI slop.

Regardless of whether you have been following Koebler’s A.I. slop beat, you owe it to yourself to read this article at least. The goal, Koelber surmises, is for Meta to target slop and ads at users in more-or-less the same way and, because this slop is cheap and fast to produce, it is a bottomless cup of engagement metrics.

Koebler, in a follow-up article:

As I wrote last week, the strategy with these types of posts is to make a human linger on them long enough to say to themselves “what the fuck,” or to be so horrified as to comment “what the fuck,” or send it to a friend saying “what the fuck,” all of which are signals to the algorithm that it should boost this type of content but are decidedly not signals that the average person actually wants to see this type of thing. The type of content that I am seeing right now makes “Elsagate,” the YouTube scandal in which disturbing videos were targeted to kids and resulted in various YouTube reforms, look quaint.

Matt Growcoot, PetaPixel:

Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.

Meta is going to make so much money before it completely disintegrates on account of nobody wanting to spend this much time around a thin veneer over robots.

Facebook to Stop Targeting Ads at U.K. Woman After Legal Fight bbc.com

Grace Dean, BBC News:

Ms O’Carroll’s lawsuit argued that Facebook’s targeted advertising system was covered by the UK’s definition of direct marketing, giving individuals the right to object.

Meta said that adverts on its platform could only be targeted to groups of a minimum size of 100 people, rather than individuals, so did not count as direct marketing. But the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) disagreed.

“Organisations must respect people’s choices about how their data is used,” a spokesperson for the ICO said. “This means giving users a clear way to opt out of their data being used in this way.”

Meta, in response, says “no business can be mandated to give away its services for free”, a completely dishonest way to interpret the ICO’s decision. There is an obvious difference between advertising and personalized advertising. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. Sure, personalized advertising makes Meta more money than non-personalized advertising, but that is an entirely different problem. Meta can figure it out. Or it can be a big soggy whiner about it.

Apple Adds Lossless Audio Support Via Cable to USB-C AirPods Max macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

The update [next month] will enable 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio, which Apple says is supported by over 100 million songs on Apple Music. Using the headphones’ USB-C cable, musicians will enjoy ultra-low latency and lossless audio in their Logic Pro workflows. The USB-C cable will allow them to produce Personalized Spatial Audio, too.

Allow me to recap the absurd timeline of lossless support for AirPods models.

In December 2020, Apple launched the first AirPods Max models promising “high-fidelity sound” and “the ultimate personal listening experience”. These headphones are mostly designed for wireless listening, but a 3.5mm-to-Lightning cable allows you to connect them to analog sources. Five months later, Apple announces lossless audio in Apple Music. These tracks are not delivered in full fidelity to any AirPods model, including the AirPods Max, because of Bluetooth bandwidth limits, nor when AirPods Max are used in wired mode.

In September 2023, Apple updates the AirPods Pro 2 with a USB-C charging case and adds lossless audio playback over “a groundbreaking wireless audio protocol”, but only when using the Vision Pro — a capability also added to the AirPods 4 line. These headphones all have the H2 chip; the pre-USB-C AirPods Pro 2 also had the H2, but do not support lossless audio.

In September 2024, Apple announces a seemingly minor AirPods Max update with new colours and a USB-C port where a Lightning one used to be. Crucially, it still contains the same H1 chip as the Lightning version.

In March 2025, Apple says lossless audio will now be supported by the AirPods Max, but only in a wired configuration, and only for the USB-C model. I feel like there must be technical reasons for this mess, but it is a mess nonetheless.

Google Lost User Data, Makes Its Recovery a Problem for Users theregister.com

Simon Sharwood, the Register:

Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.

Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people.”

The email goes on to explain that most users that availed themselves of a feature that enables encrypted backups will be able to restore their Maps Timelines data.

Once again, Google provides no explanation for why it is incapable of reliably storing user data, and no customer support. Users are on their own.

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‘Adolescence’ theguardian.com

Lucy Mangan, the Guardian:

There have been a few contenders for the crown [of “televisual perfection”] over the years, but none has come as close as Jack Thorne’s and Stephen Graham’s astonishing four-part series Adolescence, whose technical accomplishments – each episode is done in a single take – are matched by an array of award-worthy performances and a script that manages to be intensely naturalistic and hugely evocative at the same time. Adolescence is a deeply moving, deeply harrowing experience.

I did not intend on watching the whole four-part series today, maybe just the first and second episodes. But I could not turn away. The effectively unanimous praise for this is absolutely earned.

The oner format sounds like it could be a gimmick, the kind of thing that screams a bit too loud and overshadows what should be a tender and difficult narrative. Nothing could be further from the truth. The technical decisions force specific storytelling decisions, in the same way that a more maximalist production in the style of, say, David Fincher does. Fincher would shoot fifty versions of everything and then assemble the best performances into a tight machine — and I love that stuff. But I love this, too, little errors and all. It is better for these choices. The dialogue cannot get just a little bit tighter in the edit, or whatever. It is all just there.

I know nothing about reviewing television or movies but, so far as I can tell, everyone involved has pulled this off spectacularly. You can quibble with things like the rainbow party-like explanation of different emoji — something for which I cannot find any evidence — that has now become its own moral panic. I get that. Even so, this is one of the greatest storytelling achievements I have seen in years.

Update: Watch it on Netflix. See? The ability to edit means I can get away with not fully thinking this post through.

Trapping Misbehaving Bots in an A.I. Labyrinth blog.cloudflare.com

Reid Tatoris, Harsh Saxena, and Luis Miglietti, of Cloudflare:

Today, we’re excited to announce AI Labyrinth, a new mitigation approach that uses AI-generated content to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives. When you opt in, Cloudflare will automatically deploy an AI-generated set of linked pages when we detect inappropriate bot activity, without the need for customers to create any custom rules.

Two thoughts:

  1. This is amusing. Nothing funnier than using someone’s own words or, in this case, technology against them.

  2. This is surely going to lead to the same arms race as exists now between privacy protections and hostile adtech firms. Right?

Apple Could Build Great Platforms for Third-Party A.I. If It Wanted To

There is a long line of articles questioning Apple’s ability to deliver on artificial intelligence because of its position on data privacy. Today, we got another in the form of a newsletter.

Reed Albergotti, Semafor:

Meanwhile, Apple was focused on vertically integrating, designing its own chips, modems, and other components to improve iPhone margins. It was using machine learning on small-scale projects, like improving its camera algorithms.

[…]

Without their ads businesses, companies like Google and Meta wouldn’t have built the ecosystems and cultures required to make them AI powerhouses, and that environment changed the way their CEOs saw the world.

Again, I will emphasize this is a newsletter. It may seem like an article from a prestige publisher that prides itself on “separat[ing] the facts from our views”, but you might notice how, aside from citing some quotes and linking to ads, none of Albergotti’s substantive claims are sourced. This is just riffing.

I remain skeptical. Albergotti frames this as both a mindset shift and a necessity for advertising companies like Google and Meta. But the company synonymous with the A.I. boom, OpenAI, does not have the same business model. Besides, Apple behaves like other A.I. firms by scraping the web and training models on massive amounts of data. The evidence for this theory seems pretty thin to me.

But perhaps a reluctance to be invasive and creepy is one reason why personalized Siri features have been delayed. I hope Apple does not begin to mimic its peers in this regard; privacy should not be sacrificed. I think it is silly to be dependent on corporate choices rather than legislation to determine this, but that is the world some of us live in.

Let us concede the point anyhow, since it suggests a role Apple could fill by providing an architecture for third-party A.I. on its products. It does not need to deliver everything to end users; it can focus on building a great platform. Albergotti might sneeze at “designing its own chips […] to improve iPhone margins”, which I am sure was one goal, but it has paid off in ridiculously powerful Macs perfect for A.I. workflows. And, besides, it has already built some kind of plugin architecture into Apple Intelligence because it has integrated ChatGPT. There is no way for other providers to add their own extension — not yet, anyhow — but the system is there.

Gus Mueller:

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

Via Federico Viticci, MacStories:

Which brings me to my second point. The other feature that I could see Apple market for a “ChatGPT/Claude via Apple Intelligence” developer package is privacy and data retention policies. I hear from so many developers these days who, beyond pricing alone, are hesitant toward integrating third-party AI providers into their apps because they don’t trust their data and privacy policies, or perhaps are not at ease with U.S.-based servers powering the popular AI companies these days. It’s a legitimate concern that results in lots of potentially good app ideas being left on the table.

One of Apple’s specialties is in improving the experience of using many of the same technologies as everyone else. I would like to see that in A.I., too, but I have been disappointed by its lacklustre efforts so far. Even long-running projects where it has had time to learn and grow have not paid off, as anyone can see in Siri’s legacy.

What if you could replace these features? What if Apple’s operating systems were great platforms by which users could try third-party A.I. services and find the ones that fit them best? What if Apple could provide certain privacy promises, too? I bet users would want to try alternatives in a heartbeat. Apple ought to welcome the challenge.

Technofossils theguardian.com

Damian Carrington, the Guardian:

Their exploration of future fossils has led [Prof. Sarah] Gabbott and [Prof. Jan] Zalasiewicz to draw some conclusions. One is that understanding how human detritus could become fossils points towards how best to stop waste piling up in the environment.

“In the making of fossils, it’s the first few years, decades, centuries and millennia which are really crucial,” says Zalasiewicz. “This overlaps with the time in which we have the capacity to do something about it.”

Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040.

It is disconcerting to understand our evidence of civilization accumulated over the span of many tens of thousands of years, yet we have equalized that within just a few decades. We are converting so much of the matter on this planet into things we care about for only a few minutes to a few years, but their mark will last forever.

Gabbott and Zalasiewicz’s book “Discarded” is out now. I hope my local library stocks it soon.

Apple Head Computer, Apple Intelligence, and Apple Computer Heads ben-evans.com

Benedict Evans:

That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI it’s fallen flat on its face. This is a concern.

The Vision Pro shipped as promised and works as advertised. But it’s also both too heavy and bulky and far too expensive to be a viable mass-market consumer product. Hugo Barra called it an over-engineered developer kit — you could also call it an experiment, or a preview or a concept. […]

The main problem, I think, with the reception of the Vision Pro is that it was passed through the same marketing lens as Apple uses to frame all its products. I have no idea if Apple considers the sales of this experiment acceptable, the tepid developer adoption predictable, or the skeptical press understandable. However, if you believe the math on display production and estimated sales figures, they more-or-less match.

Of course, as Evans points out, Apple does not ship experiments:

The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. […]

However, it clearly is a problem that the Apple execution machine broke badly enough for Apple to spend an hour at WWDC and a bunch of TV commercials talking about vapourware that it didn’t appear to understand was vapourware. The decision to launch the Vision Pro looks like a related failure. It’s a big problem that this is late, but it’s an equally big problem that Apple thought it was almost ready.

Unlike the Siri feature delay, I do not think the Vision Pro’s launch affects the company’s credibility at all. It can keep pushing that thing and trying to turn it into something more mass-market. This Siri stuff is going to make me look at WWDC in a whole different light this year.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he’s moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven’t been announced.

[…]

Rockwell is known as the brains behind the Vision Pro, which is considered a technical marvel but not a commercial hit. Getting the headset to market required a number of technical breakthroughs, some of which leveraged forms of artificial intelligence. He is now moving away from the Vision Pro at a time when that unit is struggling to plot a future for the product.

If you had no context for this decision, it looks like Rockwell is being moved off Apple’s hot new product and onto a piece of software that perennially disappoints. It looks like a demotion. That is how badly Siri needs a shakeup.

Giannandrea will remain at the company, even with Rockwell taking over Siri. An abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous — something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giannandrea’s other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company also has a team reporting to Giannandrea investigating robotics.

I figured as much. Gurman does not clarify in this article how much of Apple Intelligence falls under Giannandrea’s rubric, and how much is part of the “Siri” stuff that is being transferred to Rockwell. It does not sound as though Giannandrea will have no further Apple Intelligence responsibilities — yet — but the high-profile public-facing stuff is now overseen by Rockwell and, ultimately, Craig Federighi.

Apple’s Restrictions on Third-Party Hardware Interoperability ericmigi.com

There is a free market argument that can be made about how Apple gets to design its own ecosystem and, if it is so restrictive, people will be more hesitant to buy an iPhone since they can get more choices with an Android phone. I get that. But I think it is unfortunate so much of our life coalesces around devices which are so restrictive compared to those which came before.

Recall Apple’s “digital hub” strategy. The Mac would not only connect to hardware like digital cameras and music players; the software Apple made for it would empower people to do something great with those photos and videos and their music.

The iPhone repositioned that in two ways. First, the introduction of iCloud was a way to “demote” the Mac to a device at an equivalent level to everything else. Second, and just as importantly, is how it converged all that third-party hardware into a single device: it is the digital camera, the camcorder, and the music player. As a result, its hub-iness comes mostly in the form of software. If a developer can assume the existence of particular hardware components, they have extraordinary latitude to build on top of that. However, because Apple exercises control over this software ecosystem, it limits its breadth.

Like the Mac of 2001, it is also a hub for accessories — these days, things like headphones and smartwatches. Apple happens to make examples of both. You can still connect third-party devices — but they are limited.

Eric Migicovsky, of Pebble:

I want to set expectations accordingly. We will build a good app for iOS, but be prepared – there is no way for us to support all the functionality that Apple Watch has access to. It’s impossible for a 3rd party smartwatch to send text messages, or perform actions on notifications (like dismissing, muting, replying) and many, many other things.

Even if you believe Apple is doing this not out of anticompetitive verve, but instead for reasons of privacy, security, API support, and any number of other qualities, it still sucks. What it means is that Apple is mostly competing against itself, particularly in smartwatches. (Third-party Bluetooth headphones, like the ones I have, mostly work fine.)

The European Commission announced guidance today for improving third-party connectivity with iOS. Apple is, of course, miserable about this. I am curious to see the real-world results, particularly as the more dire predictions of permitting third-party app distribution have — shockingly — not materialized.

Imagine how much more interesting this ecosystem could be if there were substantial support across “host” platforms.

New Version of RCS Specification Includes End-to-End Encryption gsma.com

Tom Van Pelt, technical director at GSMA:

In my last post, ‘RCS Now in iOS: a New Chapter for Mobile Messaging‘, I celebrated the integration of Rich Communication Services (RCS) with Apple’s iOS 18, a culmination of years of collaboration across mobile operators, device manufacturers, and technology providers. Today, I am pleased to announce the next milestone: the availability of new GSMA specifications for RCS that include end-to-end encryption (E2EE) based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol.

The GSMA has published a separate specification (PDF) for end-to-end encryption, distinct from that of RCS itself.

Google announced its support for MLS in 2023, though it is still building integration with Google Messages. Apple has also committed to the updated spec. This is great news. It made sense to wait until encryption was part of the official spec.

Speaking of which, the spec says (PDF) that if both parties have enabled end-to-end encryption and a message cannot be delivered over RCS, carriers will not fall back to SMS. This helps answer one part of the main question I have, which is how all of this will be differentiated to users now that there will be three standards: SMS, RCS, and end-to-end encrypted RCS. Also, because this is carrier dependent, I suspect the rollout of end-to-end encryption will be a little rocky for a beat and, in some countries, never made available.

Dribbble Wants Its Cut dribbble.com

Constantine Anastasakis, of Dribbble, a portfolio hosting site for designers that also has a job board and, as of last year, serves as an intermediary between designers and clients:

Since Week 36 of last year, the total value of transactions processed through our marketplace (GMV) has grown by an average of 15% week-over-week (without any paid marketing). As transaction activity has increased, we’ve been able to commit more resources (including engineering, moderation, and customer support), accelerating growth and generating more revenue for our designers and, in turn, for Dribbble: […]

On the one hand, this early traction has exceeded our expectations and validated the decision to undertake a business model transformation after fifteen years of operation. On the other hand, it only represents a fraction of the transaction activity that’s actually occurring between our users because some take payments off-platform (also known as “disintermediation” or “circumvention”).

[…]

Today, we’re instituting a new policy that requires clients and designers who meet on Dribbble to keep payments on Dribbble.

Dribbble, of course, collects a portion of every project’s fee.

I have not used Dribbble in ages, but I got an email today advising me that I must remove all my contact details — like my social media handles and website — from my profile and any posted work, or Dribbble would do it for me beginning in April. I must say, it seems quite odd for a platform to look at the App Store and Apple’s resulting relationship with developers and see it as something to emulate. If the response I have seen elsewhere is any indication, this is going to go over about as well.

Hudson’s Bay Plans to Liquidate Its Entire Business by June thestar.com

Estella Ren, the Toronto Star:

A Canadian retail icon is on its last legs as Hudson’s Bay Company plans to liquidate its entire business by June, with the process starting as early as next week.

This is a 350-year-old retailer that has been hollowed out in the span of less than twenty years by some private equity vultures. Yet another sad entry in a long list of businesses bought, stripped of all remaining value advantaging only some over-rich vampires, and leaving long-time employees and customers with nothing.

WWDC Should Again Have Live Demos 9to5mac.com

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Here’s the thing about pre-recorded videos: it’s way easier to market features via concept videos rather than true demos.

Sure, live demos can also be faked to fool an audience too.

But the Siri presentation was able to get a pass because highly edited videos make it easy for Apple to show something off that isn’t anywhere near ready.

Would any of this happened during the live keynote era? Sure, Apple had to contend with the many issues of prototype iPhones for the Macworld 2007 presentation — there were lots of iPhones onstage because memory management was so poor that Jobs would likely need to switch units several times, and the network connectivity was fudged to work more reliably. But it was real. The presentation contained a picture-in-picture feed of a camera set up over Jobs’ shoulder so that everyone could see he was doing everything live.

Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024 contained none of that. It is not even clear to me which demos, not just Apple Intelligence, use real screen recordings — whether recorded for real or, more likely, masked onto devices in post — and which are could be mockups. (Update: I edited this because, true enough, I do not even know if Apple shows anything that is in a purely mockup state. I assume it does — but these boundaries are entirely unclear.)

‘Ugly’ and ‘Embarrassing’ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s top executive overseeing its Siri virtual assistant told staff that delays to key features have been ugly and embarrassing, and a decision to publicly promote the technology before it was ready made matters worse.

Robby Walker, who serves as a senior director at Apple, delivered the stark comments during an all-hands meeting for the Siri division, saying that the team was facing a bad period. Walker also said that it’s unclear when the enhancements will actually launch, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the gathering was private.

Based on my experience in an Apple Store this week, this disappointment has not trickled down to retail employees. I was in for an appointment after I shattered my fifteen year record of keeping my screen intact, and I was told that even though my iPhone 15 Pro was “fine” because it supports Apple Intelligence, I could get nearly $700 towards a newer one after I had mine repaired. This was something I should at least consider, apparently. And, by the way, had I tried the new Apple Intelligence features? They are pretty great, right, especially automatic replies and Proofreading?

At least Walker apparently demonstrated unreleased Siri features during this meeting, showing this is not vapourware.

As of Friday, Apple doesn’t plan to immediately fire any top executives over the AI crisis, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That decision could theoretically change at any time. In any case, the company is poised to make management adjustments. It has discussed moving more senior executives under Giannandrea to assist with a turnaround effort. Already, the company tapped longtime executive Kim Vorrath — seen as a project fixer — to assist the group.

I find this a fascinating little paragraph. The first sentence feels almost like a controlled leak — after all, how many sources could be familiar with Apple’s executive-level staffing decisions? I think it sends a message that is good for Apple, which is that it currently has confidence in the existing team to complete this work. If it instead made changes “immediately”, it would imply this project is in an even worse state.

The second sentence is just a waste of words.

The rest of the paragraph is an expansion on the “immediately” qualifier. While everything is stable right now, things might change when the dust has settled. I have no interest in calling for anyone’s termination, but none of the rank-and-file engineers made the call to show it at WWDC and make it central to the new iPhone’s marketing campaign. The scale of this failure is the fault of executives and managers.

Canadian Sovereignty, Digital and Geographic

In just about every discussion concerning TikTok’s ability to operate within the United States, including my own, two areas of concern are cited: users’ data privacy, and the manipulation of public opinion through its feeds by a hostile foreign power. Regarding the first, the U.S., Canada, and any other country is not serious about the mishandling of private information unless it passes comprehensive data privacy legislation, so we can ignore that for now. The latter argument, however, merited my writing thousands of words in that single article. So let me dig into it again from a different angle.

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.

I do not know where Zuckerberg got his “six of the top ten” number. The closest I could find was five — based solely on total user accounts. Regardless of the actual number, Zuckerberg was correct to say Chinese internet companies have been growing at a remarkable rate, but it is a little misleading; aside from TikTok, these apps mostly remain a domestic phenomenon. WeChat’s user base, for example, is almost entirely within China, though it is growing internationally as one example of China’s “Digital Silk Road” initiative.

Tech companies from the U.S. still reign supreme nearly everywhere, however. The country exports the most popular social networks, messaging services, search engines, A.I. products, CDNs, and operating systems. Administration after administration has recognized the value to the U.S. of boosting the industry for domestic and foreign policy purposes. It has been a soft power masterstroke for decades.

In normal circumstances, this is moderately concerning for those of us in the rest of the world. Policies set in the U.S. — either those set by companies because of cultural biases or, in the case of something like privacy or antitrust, legal understanding — may not reflect expectations in other regions, and it is not ideal that so much of modern life depends so heavily on the actions of a single country.

These are not normal circumstances — especially here, in Canada. The president of the U.S. is deliberately weakening the Canadian economy in an attempt to force us to cede our sovereignty. Earlier this week, while he was using his extraordinary platform to boost the price of Tesla shares, the president reiterated this argument while also talking about increasing the size of the U.S. military. This is apparently all one big joke in a broadly similar way as is pushing a live chicken into oncoming traffic. Many people have wasted many hours and words trying to understand why he is so focused on this fifty-first state nonsense — our vast natural resources, perhaps, or the potential for polar trade routes because of warming caused by those vast natural resources. But this is someone whose thoughts, in the words of David Brooks, “are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar”. He said why he wants Canada in that Tesla infomercial. “When you take away that [border] and you look at that beautiful formation,” he said while gesticulating with his hands in a shape unlike the combined area of Canada and the United States but quite like how someone of his vibe might crassly describe a woman’s body, “there is no place anywhere in the world that looks like that”. We are nothing more than a big piece of land, and he would like to take it.

Someone — I believe it was Musk, standing just beside him — then reminded him of how he wants Greenland, too, which put a smile on his face as he said “if you add Greenland […] it’s gonna look beautiful”. In the Oval Office yesterday, he sat beside NATO’s Mark Rutte and said “we have a couple of [military] bases on Greenland already”, and “maybe you will see more and more soldiers go there, I don’t know”. It is all just a big, funny joke, from a superpower with the world’s best-funded military, overseen by a chaotic idiot. Ha ha ha.

The U.S. has become a hostile foreign power to Canada and, so, we should explore its dominance in technology under the same criteria as it has China’s purported control over TikTok and how that has impacted U.S. sovereignty. If, for instance, it makes sense to be concerned about the obligation of Chinese companies to reflect ruling party ideology, it is perhaps more worrisome U.S. tech companies are lining up to do so voluntarily. They have a choice.

Similarly, should we be suspicious that our Instagram feeds and Google searches are being tilted in a pro-U.S. direction? I am certain one could construct a study similar to those indicating a pro-China bias on TikTok (PDF) with U.S. platforms. Is YouTube pushing politically divisive videos to Canadians in an effort to weaken our country? Is Facebook suggesting pro-U.S. A.I. slop to Canadians something more than algorithmic noise?

This is before considering Elon Musk who, as both a special government employee and owner of X, is more directly controlling than Chinese officials are speculated to be over TikTok. X has become a solitary case study in state influence over social media. Are the feeds of Canadian users being manipulated? Is his platform a quasi-official propaganda outlet?

Without evidence, these ideas all strike me as conspiracy-brained nonsense. I imagine one could find just as much to support these ideas as is found in those TikTok studies, a majority of which observe the effects of select searches. The Network Contagion one (PDF), linked earlier, is emblematic of these kinds of reports, about which I wrote last year referencing two other examples — one written for the Australian government, and a previous Network Contagion report:

The authors of the Australian report conducted a limited quasi-study comparing results for certain topics on TikTok to results on other social networks like Instagram and YouTube, again finding a handful of topics which favoured the government line. But there was no consistent pattern, either. Search results for “China military” on Instagram were, according to the authors, “generally flattering”, and X searches for “PLA” scarcely returned unfavourable posts. Yet results on TikTok for “China human rights”, “Tianamen”, and “Uyghur” were overwhelmingly critical of Chinese official positions.

The Network Contagion Research Institute published its own report in December 2023, similarly finding disparities between the total number of posts with specific hashtags — like #DalaiLama and #TiananmenSquare — on TikTok and Instagram. However, the study contained some pretty fundamental errors, as pointed out by — and I cannot believe I am citing these losers — the Cato Institute. The study’s authors compared total lifetime posts on each social network and, while they say they expect 1.5–2.0× the posts on Instagram because of its larger user base, they do not factor in how many of those posts could have existed before TikTok was even launched. Furthermore, they assume similar cultures and a similar use of hashtags on each app. But even benign hashtags have ridiculous differences in how often they are used on each platform. There are, as of writing, 55.3 million posts tagged “#ThrowbackThursday” on Instagram compared to 390,000 on TikTok, a ratio of 141:1. If #ThrowbackThursday were part of this study, the disparity on the two platforms would rank similarly to #Tiananmen, one of the greatest in the Institute’s report.

The problem with most of these complaints, as their authors acknowledge, is that there is a known input and a perceived output, but there are oh-so-many unknown variables in the middle. It is impossible to know how much of what we see is a product of intentional censorship, unintentional biases, bugs, side effects of other decisions, or a desire to cultivate a less stressful and more saccharine environment for users. […]

The more recent Network Contagion study is perhaps even less reliable. It comprises a similar exploration of search results, and surveys comparing TikTok users’ views to those of non-users. In the first case, the researchers only assessed four search terms: Tibet, Tiananmen, Uyghur, and Xinjiang. TikTok’s search results produced the fewest examples of “anti-China sentiment” in comparison with Instagram and YouTube, but the actual outcomes were not consistent. Results for “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” on TikTok were mostly irrelevant; on YouTube, however, nearly half of a user’s journey would show videos supportive of China for both queries. Results for “Tibet” were much more likely to be “anti-China” on Instagram than the other platforms, though similarly “pro-China” as TikTok.

These queries are obviously sensitive in China, and I have no problem believing TikTok may be altering search results. But this study, like the others I have read, is not at all compelling if you start picking it apart. For the “Uyghur” and “Xinjiang” examples, researchers say the heavily “pro-China” results on YouTube are thanks to “pro-CCP media assets” and “official or semi-official CCP media sources” uploading loads of popular videos with a positive spin. Sometimes, TikTok is more likely to show irrelevant results; at other times, it shows “neutral” videos, which the researchers say are things like unbiased news footage. In some cases — as with results for “Tiananmen” and “Uyghur” — TikTok was similarly likely to show “pro-China” and “anti-China” results. The researchers hand-wave away these mixed outcomes by arguing “the TikTok search algorithm systematically suppresses undesirable anti-China content while flooding search results with irrelevant content”. Yet the researchers document no effort to compare the results of these search terms with anything else — controversial or politically sensitive terms outside China, for example, or terms which result in overwhelmingly dour results, or generic apolitical terms. In all cases, TikTok returns more irrelevant results than the other platforms; maybe it is just bad at search. We do not know because we have nothing to compare it to. Again, I have no problem believing TikTok may be suppressing results, but this study does not convince me it is uniformly reflecting official Chinese government lines.

As for the survey results, they show TikTok users had more favourable views of China as a travel destination and were less concerned about its human rights abuses. This could plausibly be explained by TikTok users skewing younger and, therefore, growing up seeing a much wealthier China than older generations. Younger people might simply be less aware of human rights abuses. For contrast, people who do not use TikTok are probably more likely to have negative views of China — not just because they are more likely to be older, but because they are suspicious of the platform. “When controlling for age,” the researchers say, “TikTok use significantly and uniquely predicted more positive perceptions of China’s human rights record” among video-based platforms, but Facebook users also had more positive perceptions, and nobody is claiming Facebook is in the bag for China. Perhaps there are other reasons — but they go unexplored.

This is a long digression, but it indicates to me just how possible it would be to create a similar understanding for social media’s impact on Canada. In my own experience on YouTube — admittedly different from a typical experience because I turned off video history — the Related Videos on just about everything I watch are packed with recommendations for Fox News, channels dedicated to people getting “owned”, and pro-Trump videos. I do not think YouTube is trying to sway me into a pro-American worldview and shed my critical thinking skills, but one could produce a compelling argument for it.

This is something we are going to need to pay an increasing level of attention toward. People formerly with Canadian intelligence are convinced the U.S. president is doing to Canada in public what so many before him have done to fair-weather friends in private. They believe his destabilization efforts may be supported by a propaganda strategy, particularly on Musk’s X. These efforts may not be unique to social media, either. Postmedia, the publisher of the National Post plus the most popular daily newspapers in nearly every major Canadian city, is majority U.S.-owned. This is not good.

Yet we should not treat social platforms the same as we do media organizations. We should welcome foreign-owned publications to cover our country, but the ownership of our most popular outlets should be primarily domestic. The internet does not work like that — for both good and bad — nor should we expect it to. Requiring Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. social media companies or banning them outright would continue the ongoing splintering of internet services with little benefit for Canadians or, indeed, the expectations of the internet. We should take a greater lead in determining our digital future without being so hostile to foreign services. That means things like favouring protocols over platforms, which give users more choice over their experience, and permit a level of autonomy and portability. It means ensuring a level of digital sovereignty with our most sensitive data.

It is also a reminder to question the quality of automated recommendations and search results. We do not know how any of them work — companies like Google often cite third-party manipulation as a reason to keep them secret — and I do not know that people would believe tech companies if they were more transparent in their methodology. To wit, digital advertisements often have a button or menu item explaining why you are seeing that particular ad, but it has not stopped many people from believing their conversations are picked up by a device’s microphone and used for targeting. If TikTok released the source for its recommendations engine, would anyone trust it? How about if Meta did the same for its products? I doubt it; nobody believes these companies anyway.

The tech industry is facing declining public trust. The United States’ reputation is sinking among allies and its domestic support for civil rights is in freefall. Its leader is waging economic war on the country where I live. CEOs lack specific values and are following the shifting tides. Yet our world relies on technologies almost entirely dependent on the stability of the U.S., which is currently in short supply. The U.S., as Paris Marx wrote, “needs to know that it cannot dominate the tech economy all on its own, and that the people of the world will no longer accept being subject to the whims of its dominant internet and tech companies”. The internet is a near-miraculous global phenomenon. Restricting companies based on their country of origin is not an effective way to correct this imbalance. But we should not bend to U.S. might, either. It is, after all, just one country of many. The rest of the world should encourage it to meet us at our level.

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Rotten in Cupertino daringfireball.net

John Gruber wrote an appropriately scathing piece about Apple’s inability to deliver improvements to Siri. It is a much needed perspective from someone who receives press briefings and demos, and is therefore able to better gauge Apple’s likely progress on these features. It is not looking good:

We didn’t get to try any of the Apple Intelligence features ourselves. There was no Apple Intelligence “hands on”. But we did see a bunch of features demoed, live, by Apple folks. In my above hierarchy of realness, they were all at level 1.

But we didn’t see all aspects of Apple Intelligence demoed. None of the “more personalized Siri” features, the ones that Apple, in its own statement announcing their postponement, described as having “more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps”. Those features encompass three main things: […]

There were no demonstrations of any of that. Those features were all at level 0 on my hierarchy. That level is called vaporware. They were features Apple said existed, which they claimed would be shipping in the next year, and which they portrayed, to great effect, in the signature “Siri, when is my mom’s flight landing?” segment of the WWDC keynote itself, starting around the 1h:22m mark. Apple was either unwilling or unable to demonstrate those features in action back in June, even with Apple product marketing reps performing the demos from a prepared script using prepared devices.

Those are personal context, onscreen awareness, and in-app actions. As Gruber astutely broke down the existing Apple Intelligence features by their degree of reality, I think it is worth picking apart these three, even though Apple is lumping them together under the “more personalized Siri” banner.

The first of these was described by Craig Federighi at the Talk Show Live as comprising data already indexed by Spotlight.1 If this is accurate, that now-pulled commercial in which Bella Ramsey asks Siri “what’s the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grenel?” seems entirely plausible. I can search my phone for a location — say, my barber’s shop — and Spotlight will return previous appointments there. If I ask Siri the same thing, it converts the name of the shop to an address but it cannot find any events past or future, for some reason. (This is true of all types of appointments I tried. I have an upcoming Apple Store appointment and, while it interpreted me correctly when I asked it for upcoming appointments at the store, it could not find one in my calendar.) It is not news that Siri is bad, but there is a kernel of this functionality already present in Siri. It needs to be able to search past appointments, convert “a couple of months ago” into a reasonable date span, and then connect it to other attendees in the event — but all of this is based on data already indexed.

Onscreen awareness and in-app actions both seem far more ambitious. The former is not nearly as dependent on new third-party developer support in the way in-app actions would be. Simon Willison speculates the holdup could be related to security concerns. Gruber assumes — fairly — none of these features work properly. Note how the “Cafe Grenel” ad involves what I take to be the simplest version of personalized Siri, and even that is unable to be shown to the press. While Apple included the “mom’s flight” example in the keynote, it has — thankfully — not shown an ad with anything nearly so complex.

If Apple could demonstrate a more functional Siri, I imagine it would have done so by now. That feels like the bare minimum and it seems not even that modest Spotlight-based improvement is able to be shown. The best case, right now, is that some of these features work, but only some of the time. Yet Apple decided it could present all of them way too early. We can no longer assume Apple’s WWDC presentation is a reflection of reality, nor that its public roadmap is anything more than words on a page — not until someone outside of Apple can say they have seen this work. I do not trust Siri and, right now, I also do not trust Apple to tell me what the status is with Siri, either.


  1. Mind you, this is the same interview in which John Giannandrea says the first thing he told the Siri team is “failure is not an option”. ↥︎

Google Has Also Probably Received a U.K. Backdoor Demand wyden.senate.gov

From a letter (PDF) sent by five U.S. lawmakers, linked from a press release issued by Sen. Ron Wyden:

The U.K.’s attempted gag has already restricted U.S. companies from engaging in speech that is constitutionally protected under U.S. law and necessary for ongoing Congressional oversight. Apple has informed Congress that had it received a technical capabilities notice, it would be barred by U.K. law from telling Congress whether or not it received such a notice from the U.K., as the press has reported. Google also recently told Senator Wyden’s office that, if it had received a technical capabilities notice, it would be prohibited from disclosing that fact. The U.K. embassy has also not responded to a recent request from Senator Wyden’s office regarding potential demands from the U.K. to other U.S. companies.

If Google had not received a technical capabilities notice, it would be able to simply say “no”. Because it says it cannot say anything “if it had”, it seems likely it has also been issued a similar demand for access to user data in a decrypted form.

The Slop Refinement of E-Book Scams joanwestenberg.com

Joan Westenberg:

Scroll through Instagram for a few minutes, and you’ll be swamped by a parade of sponsored posts promising extraordinary wealth through minimal effort: “PDF farming” generating €25,000 monthly, rebranded ebooks yielding “$4230 in a month,” or selling “thousands of books without writing them.”

These aren’t fringe scams hiding in the shadowy corners of the Internet.

They’re algorithmically amplified, professionally produced advertisements popping up in millions of feeds daily.

This appears to be an updated version of an old scam. Previously, as Dan Olson documented, you would scrape together the ingredients of a “book” from various gig economy servant platforms and, theoretically, sell it through Amazon and its “best-kept secret” Audible. This market is, as Westenberg writes, entirely saturated. So why bother paying people or taking any risk whatsoever when you can just generate every component? A.I. makes a get-rich-quick scheme more efficient. But it still will not work.

Conspirador Norteño

Cryptocurrency and related topics have been something of a magnet for deceptive behavior, so it’s not surprising to see an Amazon search for “cryptocurrency” bring up a sponsored listing for a book series by an author with a GAN-generated face. Authors with synthetically generated face images have been an issue on Amazon for some time now, and some of them have served up potentially lethal AI-generated culinary advice. In the case of the sponsored cryptocurrency books, the alleged author is one of a group of three authors with GAN-generated faces published by the same alleged publishing company, Tigress Publishing.

I have previously described Amazon as a “low grade flea market mixed with a liquidation store”. That now seems like high praise. In the five years since I wrote that, it has descended to feeling like one is picking through a scrap heap of products confiscated by customs agents for being dangerous, knockoffs, or stolen.

Gurman: Apple’s Operating Systems to Be Redesigned to ‘Look More Consistent’ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing one of the most dramatic software overhauls in the company’s history, aiming to transform the interface of the iPhone, iPad and Mac for a new generation of users.

The revamp — due later this year — will fundamentally change the look of the operating systems and make Apple’s various software platforms more consistent, according to people familiar with the effort. That includes updating the style of icons, menus, apps, windows and system buttons.

To state a couple of obvious things: first, this is a rumour and should only be treated as such; second, it seems to me the justifications laid out in this article are Gurman’s interpretation, not necessarily descriptive of the actual design. There is no indication Gurman has seen what it will look like.

Gurman’s explanation, though his own, certainly passes my sniff test:

A key goal of the overhaul is to make Apple’s different operating systems look similar and more consistent. Right now, the applications, icons and window styles vary across macOS, iOS and visionOS. That can make it jarring to hop from one device to another.

This is the same thing said by Alan Dye in introducing MacOS Big Sur’s overhaul less than five years ago: “we wanted consistency throughout the ecosystem, so users can move fluidly between their Apple devices”. I do not think this is a worthwhile goal unto itself. It is unclear to me how today’s Apple operating systems are insufficiently consistent in ways that are not beneficial to the user experience. I do not think MacOS, iOS, and VisionOS should all look and work the same because they are all used in completely different ways.

This is also not the first time this rumour has shown up. Last February, Israeli publication the Verifier reported this design was due for iOS 18 — right idea, wrong timeline. Then, in January, Jon Prosser showed a mockup of what he said was the Camera app in iOS 19, saying it “would be weird to just exist there […] in one place. We could be looking at a full redesign”. There is a building expectation for this on iOS and, by extension, iPadOS. Gurman is reporting the same treatment is due for MacOS, too.

This has me excited and worried in similar measure. There are things on all of these products which could use rethinking. This could be the culmination of many years of rethinking every component and interaction to figure out what works best. But I do not think it is worth getting too hopeful for a rethink or even a reintroduction of depth and texture across Apple’s systems. This set of redesigns may be described here as “dramatic” but, given the number of users who depend on these operating systems, I doubt it will be. I do not think much re-learning will be expected, despite Gurman’s belief this will “go well beyond a new coat of paint like iOS 7”.

I am trying not to get too far in my thoughts until I see it for real, but I do not like the sound of more glassy, translucent effects. One of the most common phrases I have used in recent years of filing Apple bug reports is “insufficient contrast”. I am not optimistic that pattern will not continue.

Firefox’s New Terms of Use and Privacy Notice mjtsai.com

While I am on the subject of Mozilla, the organization added a terms of use document for Firefox and revised its privacy obligations. It went badly.

Jan Schaumann on Mastodon:

Wait, what? By using #Firefox, I now grant Mozilla “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use” any data I “upload or input”? That seems, uhm, rather broad. Wtf.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. […]

Michael Tsai:

This is the same thing Adobe did. It’s not great to put the key information in what is essentially a FAQ that doesn’t seem as legally binding as a ToS. And the clarification says that they can only use the data as described in the Privacy Notice, while the actual Terms of Service say that that Mozilla gets “all rights necessary” including using it as described in the Privacy Notice. So it seems like the Privacy Notice cannot constrain their behavior, but they want us to think it does.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

After fielding user backlash over its new Terms of Use last week, Firefox browser maker Mozilla has rewritten its policy to address issues around the overly broad language it had previously used. Critics said the terms implied Mozilla was asking users for the rights to whatever data they input into the browser or upload, which some worried would be then sold to advertisers or AI companies.

I find Mozilla’s explanations for these changes sufficient, but I also understand why users were worried. The document said what it said. I do not see Mozilla saying these interpretations were legally incorrect. Like Tsai, I also thought first of Adobe’s terms of use update — another entry in a long list of spooky boilerplate permissive language in a contract.

Firefox Users on iOS Have Doubled in France and Germany blog.mozilla.org

Christina Petrova, communications manager at Mozilla:

Since the launch of the first DMA browser choice screens on iOS in March 2024, people are making themselves heard: Firefox daily active users in Germany alone have increased by 99%. And in France, Firefox’s daily active users on iOS grew by 111%.

I have confirmed with Petrova these numbers reflect growth in iOS users only. They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.

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U.S. Drops Bid to Make Google Sell A.I. Investments in Antitrust Case reuters.com

Josh Sisco and Davey Alba, Bloomberg, earlier this week:

Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, according to people familiar with the discussions.

[…]

Google’s argument isn’t new, and it has previously raised these concerns in public in response to antitrust pressure from regulators and lawmakers. But the company is re-upping the issue in discussions with officials at the department under Trump because the case is in its second stage, known as the “remedy” phase, during which the court can impose sweeping changes on Google’s business.

Ryan Whitwam, Ars Technica:

The government’s 2024 request also sought to have Google’s investment in AI firms curtailed even though this isn’t directly related to search. If, like Google, you believe leadership in AI is important to the future of the world, limiting its investments could also affect national security. But in November, Mehta suggested he was open to considering AI remedies because “the recent emergence of AI products that are intended to mimic the functionality of search engines” is rapidly shifting the search market.

Jody Godoy, Reuters:

The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday dropped a proposal to force Alphabet’s Google to sell its investments in artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI competitor Anthropic, to boost competition in online search.

[…]

Many of the measures prosecutors proposed in November remain intact with a few tweaks.

For example, a requirement that Google share search query data with competitors now says that Google can charge a marginal fee for access and that the competitors must not pose a national security risk.

The Department of Justice included in its filings today a version of the proposed judgement with revisions shown (PDF). Google’s proposed judgement (PDF) is, rather predictably, much shorter. It sounds like its national security arguments swayed the prosecution, however.

A Bit of A.I. Siri Followup bloomberg.com

Earlier today, in reacting to the news of delayed Siri updates, I noted Mark Gurman had recently reported these features could be released in May, but I doubted it. It turns out I could have been more up-to-date if I had bothered to refresh his author page at Bloomberg.

Gurman:

Bloomberg News reported on Feb. 14 that Apple was struggling to finish developing the features and the enhancements would be postponed until at least May — when iOS 18.5 is due to arrive. Since then, Apple engineers have been racing to fix a rash of bugs in the project. The work has been unsuccessful, according to people involved in the efforts, and they now believe the features won’t be released until next year at the earliest.

Take this with a grain of salt, of course — these could be pessimistic engineers ranting in Gurman’s direct messages, for all we know — but it does seem to match the tone of the statement. Maybe these features come in an early iOS 19 build. Probably, though, they get dragged out to one of the updates next year after Apple — again, according to Gurman’s reporting — may rebuild the features as part of new Siri architecture.

One more little thing, courtesy Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question.

The commercial starred Bella Ramsey who should probably win an award for acting like Siri worked.

Nice.

Apple Confirms Delayed Launch of Personalized Siri Features

Apple spokesperson Jacqueline Roy, in a statement provided seemingly first to both Stephen Nellis, of Reuters, and John Gruber:

[…] We’ve also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year.

Unsurprisingly, this news comes on a Friday and is announced via a carefully circulated statement instead of on Apple’s own website. It is a single feature, but it is a high-priority one showcased in its celebrity infused ads for its flagship iPhone models. I think Apple ought to have published its own news instead of relying on other outlets to do its dirty work, but it fits a pattern. It happened with AirPods and again with AirPower; the former has become wildly successful, while the latter was canned.

This announcement reflects rumours of the feature’s fraught development. Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in February:

The company first unveiled plans for a new AI-infused Siri at its developers conference last June and has even advertised some of the features to customers. But Apple is still racing to finish the software, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. Some features, originally planned for April, may have to be postponed until May or later, they said.

Do note how “or later” is doing the bulk of the work in this paragraph. Nevertheless, he seems to have forecasted the delay announced today.

While it is possible to reconcile Apple’s “coming year” timeline with Gurman’s May-or-later availability while staying within the current release cycle, the statement is a tacit acknowledgement these features are now slated for the next major versions of Apple’s operating system, perhaps no sooner than a release early next year. I do not see why Apple would have issued this statement if it were confident it could ship personalized Siri before September’s new releases. That is a long time between marketing and release for any company, and particularly so for Apple.

This is a risk of announcing something before it is ready, something the WWDC keynote is increasingly filled with. Instead of monolithic September releases with occasional tweaks throughout the year, Apple adopted a more incremental strategy. I would like to believe this has made Apple’s software more polished — or, less charitably, slowed its quality decline. What it has actually done is turn Apple’s big annual software presentation into a series of promises to be fulfilled throughout the year. To its credit, it has almost always delivered and, so, it has been easy to assume the hot streak will continue. This is a good reminder we should treat anything not yet shipping in a release or beta build as a potential feature only.

The delay may ultimately be good news. It is better for Apple to ship features that work well than it is to get things out the door quickly. Investors do not seem bothered; try spotting the point on today’s chart when Gruber and Reuters published the statements they received. And, anyway, most Apple Intelligence features released so far seem rushed and faulty. I would not want to see more of the same. Siri has little reputation to lose, so it makes sense to get this round of changes more right than not.

Besides, Apple only just began including the necessary APIs in the latest developer betas of iOS 18.4. No matter when Apple gets this out, the expansiveness of its functionality is dependent on third-party buy-in. There was a time when developer adoption of new features was a given. That is no longer the case.

According to Gurman as recently as earlier this week, a May release is possible (Update: Oops, I should have checked again.), but I would bet against it. If his reporting is to be believed, however, the key features announced as delayed today require a wholly different architecture which Apple was planning on merging with the existing Siri infrastructure midway through the iOS 19 cycle. It seems possible to me the timeline on both projects could now be interlinked. After all, why not? It is not like Siri is getting worse. No rush.

Brazilian Court Requires Apple to Permit Sideloading Within Ninety Days valorinternational.globo.com

Guilherme Pimenta, Valor Econômico:

The Federal Regional Court of the 1st Region (TRF-1) has overturned a trial ruling and reinstated an injunction imposed by the Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) on Apple, as part of an investigation into alleged abuse of dominant position in the app distribution market for iOS devices. According to the ruling, the company will have 90 days to implement the changes mandated by the antitrust authority.

Under the previous ruling, overturned in December, Apple had just twenty days to comply. The judge said the new timeline is reasonable given both the “fast-paced dynamic of the technology market” and:

“Apple has already complied with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating significant impact or irreparable harm to its economic model,” the judge pointed out. “The implementation of structural changes in operating systems, indeed, requires some planning and technical development, which may demand more time than stipulated in the administrative decision,” he considered in the ruling.

The rules are changing worldwide. Apple can make this easy for itself, or it can tediously lose its fights one country at a time.

Canadians’ Health Data Needs Safeguarding Against Our Increasingly Hostile Neighbour theglobeandmail.com

Michael Geist and Kumanan Wilson, the Globe and Mail:

Given recent turbulent events and the diminishing trust between Canada and the U.S., it is entirely possible that Washington would seek enhanced access to sensitive Canadian data, notably including financial and health data. This data could be invaluable for developing AI algorithms, for instance, a current priority of the Trump administration.

[…]

Mandated data localization requirements would be an important policy response from Canada. While the end goal would be to establish viable Canadian-controlled cloud services ready to compete with U.S. giants, this may be a way off. An interim measure would involve further beefing up Canadian privacy law by ensuring that Canadian health data is encrypted, resides on servers in Canada and is subject to serious penalties for non-consensual disclosures.

I remain steadfastly opposed to trusting the U.S. government with data about non-U.S. citizens. There are some cases where it offers increased protections, but many where it is a risk — now increasing.

Digg Reboots Again torment-nexus.mathewingram.com

Samantha Subin, CNBC:

Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.

Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”

Before it was acquired by Money Group, a publisher and advertising company, Digg was previously owned by BuySellAds. No word on how many people were working on the most recent version and whether any of them will continue.

Mathew Ingram:

What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.

I am considerably less optimistic than Ingram. Digg has been relaunched a few times — first as a curated link aggregator, then as a web magazine, with a detour for building a Google Reader-like RSS client. Under BuySellAds, it appeared to fill a Buzzfeed-like best-of-the-web role.

Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.

The Web Was Always About Redistribution of Power werd.io

Ben Werdmuller:

The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.

I imagine this will continue to ebb and flow over time. The vast majority of people still congregate on closed platforms that are begrudgingly loosening their hold thanks to legislative efforts, mostly in Europe. But there does seem to be growing discontent and mistrust.

Wine Prices Raised by Alberta Government cbc.ca

Colleen Underwood, CBC News:

The province says the flat rate for wine is going up another 15 cents per 750 ml bottle.

And it’s creating a new ad valorem, or “value added” fee, that will go up as the price of wine goes up, on top of the flat fee.

For example, according to the province, a $25 750 ml bottle of wine will cost another 20 to 40 cents, but a $50 750 ml bottle of wine will cost anywhere from $2.80 to $3.25 more.

This was announced to retailers with basically no warning. The province is using the wholesale per-litre price to assess this additional levy, meaning a standard 750 mL bottle of wine costing over $11.25 from a distributor is considered “high value”. Based on the wholesale prices I have seen from one importer, that would include the vast majority of wine from our neighbours in British Columbia, at a time when they need support after last year’s cold snap.

This is not my usual beat here, but I wanted to highlight some local lies, emphasis mine:

“Changes to the liquor markup system were undertaken with the objective of minimizing the impact to Alberta consumers and support social responsibility as they ensure products with a higher content of alcohol are subject to higher markup rates,” said Brandon Aboultaif, press secretary to the Service Albert and Red Tape Reduction Minister, Dale Nally.

This is nonsense. The markup rate for spirits with 22–60% alcohol by volume, which comprises virtually all “hard” liquor on store shelves, remains identical for major producers and, for qualifying “small manufacturers”, has been reduced (PDF) compared to the previous rates (PDF). The government, according to Underwood, says this wine-specific tax is intended to “address industry concerns, improve equity within the system, and support the growth of Alberta’s liquor manufacturing industry”. Alberta does not have a wine industry; it does, however, make a lot of beer and spirits. What this sounds like, in part, is that wine drinkers are seen as snooty cosmopolitain types, not like good old-fashioned beer and whisky drinkers.

I have little problem in principle with taxing my vices or, say, increasing other taxes to pay for stuff. That is understandable. But I do not appreciate being lied to.

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton Honoured With 2024 Turing Award acm.org

The Association for Computing Machinery which — and this is not, strictly speaking, important — ought to have a way cooler logo than it actually does:

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton as the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s, Barto and Sutton introduced the main ideas, constructed the mathematical foundations, and developed important algorithms for reinforcement learning—one of the most important approaches for creating intelligent systems.

Barto is Professor Emeritus of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sutton is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, a Research Scientist at Keen Technologies, and a Fellow at Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute).

The University of Alberta has a good summary of Sutton’s contributions to the field’s development internationally and in this province. Great things can happen when people work together across borders.

Tapbots Reveals ‘Phoenix’ Bluesky Client for Summer Release macstories.net

John Voorhees, MacStories:

Tapbots, the makers of Mastodon client Ivory, announced today that they are working on a Bluesky client. The app, which will be called Phoenix, is planned for release this summer.

I have been begging for a decent Bluesky client for MacOS. This looks promising. And, if it has the same system requirements as Ivory, it means I will be able to run it on my ageing Intel iMac. Truly miraculous.

Apple Says Not Every Generation Will See an ‘Ultra’ Chip arstechnica.com

Apple:

Apple today announced the new Mac Studio, the most powerful Mac ever made, featuring M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chip. The ultimate pro desktop delivers groundbreaking pro performance, extensive connectivity now with Thunderbolt 5, and new capabilities in its compact and quiet design that can live right on a desk. Mac Studio can tackle the most intense workloads with its powerful CPU, Apple’s advanced graphics architecture, higher unified memory capacity, ultrafast SSD storage, and a faster and more efficient Neural Engine. It provides a big boost in performance compared to the previous generation, and a massive leap for users coming from older Macs.

The introduction of the M3 Ultra, for which Apple issued an entirely separate press release, is a curious twist. Every other Mac available today updated in the past year uses the M4 generation, mostly because Apple makes essentially two computers: consumer Macs — the iMac, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini — and its more “pro” Macs, with the M chip architecture generally shared across each these lines. You can quibble with my oversimplification — there is one M4 Pro configuration available for the Mac Mini, and the MacBook Pro now starts with the no-suffix M4 — but it is correct enough to make it conspicuous that the Mac Pro, the Studio’s architectural sibling, was not updated today.

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.

This statement doesn’t totally preclude the possibility of an eventual M4 Ultra — if Apple wanted to put more space in between the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, reserving its best chip for the Mac Pro could be one way to do it. But it does suggest that Apple will skip the M4 Ultra entirely, opting to refresh these gigantic and niche chips on a slower cadence than the rest of its processors.

Seeing the Studio updated today instead of at WWDC gave me hope for a radical Mac Pro update in June. Apple’s statement to Cunningham makes me think that might not be coming.

Cloudflare Blocking Privacy Focused Users From Accessing Third-Party Websites theregister.com

Liam Proven, the Register:

According to some in the Hacker News discussion of the problem, something else that can count as suspicious – other than using niche browsers or OSes – is something as simple as asking for a URL unaccompanied by any referrer IDs. To us, that sounds like a user with good security measures that block tracking, but it seems that, to the CDN merchant, this looks like an alert to an action that isn’t operated by a human.

Making matters worse, Cloudflare tech support is aimed at its corporate customers, and there seems to be no direct way for non-paying users to report issues other than the community forums. The number of repeated posts suggests to us that the company isn’t monitoring these for reports of problems.

The more privacy you want on the open web, the more cumbersome it becomes. There are reasons for this — every website is being constantly scraped for A.I. training, mining contact data, and generally abusing the social contract of public access. Administrators, understandably, want to limit the amount of automated traffic. To do so, they depend on tools from the same handful of companies as everyone else. And, if you have taken steps to improve your privacy online, your traffic looks abnormal, which is apparently suspicious.

The open web is becoming ever more complicated. You must frequently confirm your humanity. Google now requires JavaScript just to search, since it is also apparently trying to combat bots and scrapers. Everything, even viewing a relatively basic document, feels degraded unless you abandon control over your experience either on the web or in an app.

Apple Appeals U.K. Backdoor Demand to Investigatory Powers Tribunal bbc.com

Zoe Kleinman, BBC News:

Apple is taking legal action to try to overturn a demand made by the UK government to view its customers’ private data if required.

The BBC understands that the US technology giant has appealed to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court with the power to investigate claims against the Security Service.

Neither the BBC nor the Financial Times, which broke this news, has any details about the appeal, presumably because nobody can talk about this in public through official channels. According to both reports, it is possible this whole thing will be conducted in secret, too.

It looks like I, by way of Mike Masnick, was wrong to believe the only grounds on which Apple could fight this are financial. It turns out there is an appeals process which I could have found at any time — and in even more detail (PDF) — if I had double-checked. That is on me. However, in the first four years appeals were permitted on legal grounds, just two cases (PDF) were heard, with one being dismissed.

The way this is playing out is farcical. Nobody is legally permitted to discuss it, so we have only on-background leaks from Apple (almost certainly, I am guessing) and U.K. intelligence (maybe) to the same handful of reporters. This has advantages for both parties since they can craft a narrative through limited disclosures, but it means the rest of us can only speculate about how long Apple will be permitted to offer uncompromised end-to-end encryption worldwide.

Did the Trump Administration Minimize Russian Cyber Threats? zetter-zeroday.com

Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian:

A recent memo at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) set out new priorities for the agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security and monitors cyber threats against US critical infrastructure. The new directive set out priorities that included China and protecting local systems. It did not mention Russia.

Martin Matishak, the Record:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Kim Zetter:

Taken together, the two stories raised alarms that the policy changes would have a drastic impact on U.S. national security and make the country more vulnerable to cyberattacks from Vladimir Putin’s hackers. The Record noted that the order to Cyber Command provided “evidence of the White House’s efforts to normalize ties with Moscow,” and the Guardian quoted a source who said that the change at CISA represented a win for Russia. “Putin is on the inside now,” the source told the Guardian.

Although a number of people on social media seem to believe The Record story corroborates The Guardian story (I won’t call anyone out here), the two stories are reporting different things and are based on different sources.

[…]

I’ll first parse what the two stories said and didn’t say and then look at what has changed since they published.

We all know that reporting during a breaking news cycle is going to contain inaccuracies. When it is the policy of the U.S. government to set in motion a series of these cycles on a seemingly daily basis, it is difficult to get a handle on anything. I appreciate Zetter’s more careful reading and verification with her sources. If you want a better idea of what is — and is not — known about the U.S. cybersecurity posture regarding Russia, her analysis is the one to read.

Potions and Spells 8ball.report

Sean Monahan:

People love to quote the third of Arthur C. Clark’s laws — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And almost always with a positive spin. The Disneyfied language makes it sound wondrous. But let’s reconsider the quote with a different word:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft.

This is far from the first article aligning new technologies — particularly artificial intelligence — with magical thinking. Just searching some related keywords yields at least three academic papers, plus loads of articles with similar framing. Some include this same Clarke quote for obvious reasons.

Monahan, though, ties it to a broader social condition in which magical thinking is on the rise, and there is something to think about in this. I am not necessarily in agreement — I think this is more of an interesting exercise in language than it is describing a broader trend — but I have also just finished reading “If It Sounds Like a Quack” and, so, my head might be in a funny space.

The U.S. Government Is Apparently Upset About the U.K. iCloud Backdoor Demand ft.com

Joseph Menn, Washington Post:

The U.S. Justice Department told Congress in November that there were no major disputes with the United Kingdom over how the two allies seek data from each other’s communication companies.

But at that time, officials knew British authorities were preparing a demand that Apple build a back door to its users’ encrypted data, according to people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal department matters.

There are only two reasons I can see for Biden officials to omit this from their report: first because it was not, in November, a current dispute but a potential future one; and, second, it understood it could not talk about it. Neither seems justifiable.

Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

Donald Trump has lashed out at the UK’s demand for Apple to grant secret access to its most secure cloud storage system, comparing the move to “something … that you hear about with China”.

[…]

Earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, said any move to force Apple to build a back door into its systems would cause “grave concern” as an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy. Gabbard said she had ordered lawyers and intelligence officials to investigate the matter.

It is amazing to see this particularly despicable U.S. administration arguing for the correct position given its history. To be fair, Tulsi Gabbard is less of a surprise; though she now apparently supports U.S. surveillance programmes, she has a history of questioning privacy overreaches. But the first Trump administration was not at all friendly to end-to-end encryption. According to Menn, then at Reuters, the FBI tried to pressure Apple to kill its plans for end-to-end encryption in iCloud, a feature which would ultimately be launched – in 2022 – as Advanced Data Protection. In 2019, the U.S. was exploring whether it could ban end-to-end encryption entirely and, in 2020, was a co-signatory on a multilateral statement requesting a backdoor as policy.

Thankfully, none of the more extreme U.S. positions on end-to-end encryption has become law. And, while the U.S. is among many in opposing end-to-end encryption, there have been no reports of it compelling service providers to do what the U.K. government is expecting of Apple, though Menn reports the FBI has tried. That is not to say the U.S. would not issue a mandate, nor that we would find out about it. The PRISM program was a backdoor into tech company data maintained secretly for six years before its existence was revealed by Edward Snowden, while Yahoo built (maybe?) a way for it to search users’ email accounts after being compelled of the U.S. government. I do not think anyone should expect ideological or principled consistency from the Trump administration on this matter. There is a history of U.S. officials making these kinds of demands.

Maybe there is a third reason Biden officials did not want to notify Congress after all.