![one new follower](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2026/2026-04-instagram-lie.png\"){kind=link}
![Works on this iMac](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2026/2026-04-pages-mas-closed.jpg\"){kind=link}
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![\"Best](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2025/2025-07-magic-lasso-youtube.png\")
Tom Babin, of the excellent Shifter channel on YouTube, shared a very clever trick of using Shortcuts with an NFC chip \u2014 perhaps using a hotel keycard you forgot to return \u2014 to launch Strava or Komoot. I am terrible at remembering to track typical rides like my commute so I set this up and tucked the card into my wallet. Perhaps that will help.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-17T09:09:45-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-17T09:13:02-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/meta-massachusetts-lawsuit/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/meta-massachusetts-lawsuit/", "external_url": "https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-must-face-youth-addiction-lawsuit-by-massachusetts-court-rules-2026-04-10/", "title": "Meta Must Face Youth Addiction Lawsuit by Massachusetts, Court Rules", "content_html": "Nate Raymond, Reuters
\n\n\n\n\nMeta Platforms must face a lawsuit \u200bby Massachusetts’ attorney general alleging the company designed its Instagram social media platform to addict children, the state’s top court ruled on Friday.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nWriting for the unanimous court, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt said \u200bthe lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell does not seek to hold Meta liable for content created by its \u200busers \u2014 which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally shields companies from \u2014 but targets the company\u2019s conduct.
\n
The Electronic Privacy Information Center:
\n\n\n\n\nIn this case, as in many recent ones, the Court found that Section 230 does not prohibit claims alleging the companies designed their platforms harmfully and lied about their activities. Meta pushed its typical Section 230 test, claiming the law preempts any claim premised on Meta\u2019s publishing activity. But the Court corrected Meta: Section 230 only applies to claims seeking to hold Meta liable for the harms springing directly from user-generated content they post. Meta\u2019s design decisions, by contrast, are its own responsibility.
\n
Mike Masnick, Techdirt:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis ignores a long list of precedents \u2014 and the explicit statements of Section 230\u2019s authors \u2014 establishing that the law was designed to protect platforms from being sued over any editorial decision-making, including how content is presented. To put this in perspective, it\u2019s like saying that someone could sue, say, the evening news based on where they placed a story (top of the show or bottom?) and that the impact of how it was presented is somehow unrelated to the content itself. That makes no sense. But it\u2019s the way this court has interpreted 230.
\n
\n\n\nEven if this opinion doesn\u2019t outright eliminate Section 230 in Massachusetts, it\u2019s a sign of how 230 workarounds keep proliferating, contributing to the swiss cheese-ification of Section 230. When the bubbles in the swiss cheese become too large, the cheese wedge lacks structural integrity and falls apart. That is where 230 is heading, if it\u2019s not already there.
\n
Goldman is a lawyer and is worried about cases like these; the recent child safety cases in California and New Mexico also caused great concern.
\n\nTo me, a non-lawyer, much of the actual text of the ruling (PDF) explaining why this lawsuit was not immediately turfed on Section 230 grounds seems pretty reasonable. For example, the judge says “[u]nder the default settings, Meta enables approximately forty types of notifications” for the Instagram app, which the government alleges “is designed to overwhelm young users and compel them repeatedly to reopen Instagram”. We can argue whether this is a meaningful thing for a government to police or if it is just another example of Meta resorting to tacky growth-hacking techniques instead of trusting their product is sufficiently compelling on its own. (Most days when I open Instagram in my browser, it puts a red badge over the notifications tab and suggests I have one new follower. I do not; I never have. It lies to me every time, presumably because it knows most people, including me, will usually click on that, thereby increasing a number on a dashboard somewhere.)
\n\nThe government also raises issue with autoplay, infinite scrolling, live videos, and disappearing stories as potential vectors for harm. Whether this is true or false is immaterial to whether someone should have legal standing to make the argument in court. I, a non-lawyer, do not see why Section 230 should insulate companies from their product design choices simply because they occur on the internet. There is a tantalizing reference to Meta “deliberately manufacturing a delay between” a user refreshing their feed and new posts being displayed to, supposedly, heighten anticipation. Whether this is as described is something that can be scrutinized in court \u2014 but only if the government is allowed to make that case.
\n\nIt entirely makes sense to me for a company like Meta to face no legal liability for the substance of a user’s post, like if an Instagram user baselessly accuses someone of a crime in a video they post. It is the person making that claim who should face legal consequences. But extending this legal moratorium to all facets of a platform containing user-generated material seems \u2014 as a non-lawyer with only a little bit of background knowledge \u2014 too far. I trust experts, but I am not following their logic that this would effectively repeal Section 230 and all the ways in which it has given birth to the modern web.
\n\nOne thing is certain: given that many internet companies are headquartered in the United States, it is wild that a single ruling by a court in Massachusetts \u2014 a tiny state with a population of about seven million \u2014 could conceivably change the way the web works for just about everyone around the world.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-16T21:00:31-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-16T21:00:31-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/macworld-app-store-own-risk/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/macworld-app-store-own-risk/", "external_url": "https://www.macworld.com/article/3115356/use-apples-app-store-at-your-own-risk.html", "title": "Macworld: \u2018Use Apple’s App Store at Your Own Risk\u2019", "content_html": "Reece Rogers, Wired, in January:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the first month of 2026, Freecash has rocketed to popularity among US users. This week it reached the number two position on Apple\u2019s free iOS download charts, nestled between ChatGPT and Gemini. The bump in downloads coincides with a spree of ads promoting the Freecash app.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nWhile Freecash does actually pay out money to users, it’s not for scrolling social media. The app\u2019s business model is centered around getting new users to play mobile games and then providing the players with monetary rewards. Those promises of direct payments to scroll aimlessly on TikTok sound too good to be true, because they are.
\n
The app’s privacy policy also permits broad data collection as users install the ad-supported games it funnels them into.
\n\nSarah Perez, TechCrunch, this week:
\n\n\n\n\nOn Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).
\n
Oliver Knight, CoinDesk:
\n\n\n\n\nA fake version of Ledger Live distributed via Apple\u2019s App Store has been linked to at least $9.5 million in crypto theft, with victims now coming forward describing devastating losses, including entire retirement funds wiped out \u201cin an instant.\u201d
\n \nOne victim, posting on X under the handle @glove, said he lost 5.9 BTC \u2013 his entire savings accumulated over a decade \u2013 after downloading what he believed was the official Ledger app while setting up a new computer.
\n
That is not “glove”; it is “G. Love”, of G. Love and Special Sauce fame.
\n\nDavid Price, Macworld:
\n\n\n\n\nThere are two facts which unite these two apps. First, Apple allowed them on to the App Store when it absolutely should not have done. Second, when problems emerged, it let them stay there longer than it had any business doing. And these raise major concerns about the way the App Store is run, and the rationale behind Apple\u2019s stewardship of the market for apps on its products.
\n
Apple also left Grok and X on the App Store even after it was turned into a factory for abusive images. In a January letter to three U.S. Senators, Apple said xAI’s first attempt at fixing this problem was insufficient, and required it make more extensive changes or the apps would be removed from the App Store, according to David Ingram of NBC News. (I should stress that this article is hard paywalled, but the audio player at the top has an A.I. voice readout of its full text. My interpretation is based on that.)
\n\nPrice calls the App Store “rotten” \u2014 is there any other word? \u2014 and says Apple should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue” if it cannot effectively police its wares. I imagine Apple would argue it enforces its rules all the time and sometimes things just get through.
\n\nBut that kind of response only reveals the scale of the store and, consequently, the problem: nobody can effectively govern this many items, especially when they are all user-submitted. Walmart has a few hundred thousand individual products, while Costco has about four thousand and says most supermarkets have in the range of tens of thousands. The App Store is ungovernable at this size, and high-profile incidents like the ones above only reinforce that sentiment.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-15T22:36:07-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-15T22:36:07-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/live-nation-monopoly/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/live-nation-monopoly/", "external_url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyddyp19yyo", "title": "Live Nation Is an Illegal Monopoly, Jury Finds", "content_html": "Alanna Durkin Richer and Larry Neumeister, reporting for the Associated Press last month:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Justice Department touted a tentative settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment on Monday as a victory for consumers that would end an illegal monopoly over live events in America, but over two dozen states planned to keep fighting the companies in court.
\n
Noah Shachtman, writing for the New York Times:
\n\n\n\n\nIt\u2019s hard to overstate how thoroughly Live Nation controls the live music business and how directly that control hurts fans. Let\u2019s say you were one of the thousands of people who went to see Megan Thee Stallion\u2019s most recent show in Charlotte, N.C. Some fees went to Ticketmaster, which Live Nation owns. Some of the purchase price went to the venue, then called the PNC Music Pavilion, which is operated by Live Nation. Some went to the tour\u2019s promoter: Live Nation again. Another slice went to Megan and her team, which includes her managers, who work at a company co-owned by, you guessed it, Live Nation.
\n \nCompetitors charge high fees, too, but Live Nation is different because of its vertical integration. The company \u201coffers every service in the chain,\u201d Judge Subramanian noted, \u201csave \u2014 for now, perhaps \u2014 the job of the artists themselves.\u201d
\n
Archie Mitchell and Kali Hays, BBC News:
\n\n\n\n\nLive Nation, the entertainment giant which owns Ticketmaster, has been illegally operating as a monopoly and overcharging fans, a federal jury has found.
\n \nThe verdict followed four days of deliberations in a seven-week trial in New York City that could have a major impact on the music industry.
\n \nThe concert venue and music festival owner could be forced to divest parts of its business or even split from Ticketmaster, an outcome former Attorney General Merrick Garland called for when he filed the lawsuit in May 2024.
\n
The U.S. Department of Justice debased itself with last month’s settlement, personally requested by the expert dealmaker himself, and this verdict seals how embarrassing it was. It was bananas that governments worldwide permitted the acquisition of Ticketmaster by Live Nation in the first place, let alone all the other parts of the entertainment and event industry controlled by this single company. Break it into little pieces.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-15T17:10:52-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-15T17:10:52-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/webxray-opt-out-audit/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/webxray-opt-out-audit/", "external_url": "https://globalprivacyaudit.org/2026/california", "title": "WebXRay Audit Finds Opt-Out Tracking Requests Are Not Honoured", "content_html": "WebXRay is a tool built by a former Google privacy engineer to audit websites for specific violations that may be legally actionable. The company markets its product to litigators finding privacy violations for lawsuits, and to businesses trying to understand their own compliance.
\n\nA recent audit by the company of popular websites indicates most still track users even when they opt out:
\n\n\n\n\nMore concerning is that Cookie Choice Banners certified by Google fail to prevent Google from setting cookies after users opt out with a globally standard signal.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nThe California AG has endorsed Global Privacy Control (GPC) as the mechanism for consumers to exercise this right at scale. Under regulation, businesses must honor it. In 2022, the AG fined Sephora $1.2M for ignoring GPC. In 2025, Disney paid $2.75M \u2014 the largest CCPA settlement ever.
\n
Google, Meta, and Microsoft all provided statements to 404 Media disputing its findings.
\n\nThis report is split into two parts: Global Privacy Control and cookie banners, and I will begin with the latter. What is at best an attempt to put privacy controls in users’ hands is a burden and, according to WebXRay, does not work in most cases. Three providers audited by the company, all certified by Google and anonymized in this report, still permitted tracking in 77\u201391% of cases when users declined tracking cookies.
\n\nThe irritation of these banners was supposed to be solved by the Global Privacy Control, which is more-or-less a replacement for the Do Not Track spec with actual legal obligation. But GPC is not yet a browser-level preference in Chrome or Safari. Also, this audit found tracking cookies from Microsoft were set 50% of the time when the GPC opt-out signal was set, Meta cookies were set 69% of the time, and Google’s were set 86% of the time.
\n\nI assume the numbers are not either 100% or 0%, as I would expect for out-of-the-box code, because some website developers must have customized their implementation to be legally compliant. That should be unnecessary. If we are going to make users responsible for carefully managing their privacy \u2014 which should also be unnecessary, but one thing at a time \u2014 they should at least work properly.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-14T22:17:57-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-14T22:17:57-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/hospitality-without-hospitality/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/hospitality-without-hospitality/", "external_url": "https://www.404media.co/airbnb-hosts-dont-want-to-talk-to-guests-anymore-are-outsourcing-messages-to-ai/", "title": "A Hospitality Industry Without Hospitality", "content_html": "There was once a time when the hospitality industry was staffed by people who were at least nominally interested in the comfort and happiness of their guests. Yes, of course it was also about making money — like any job — but the reason someone would be a guest’s point of contact in a restaurant or hotel was because they were pretty good at service. That still exists, but they are now competing with people who hate everything about their guests except the money they bring.
\n\nJoseph Cox, of 404 Media, looked at a bunch of large language model platforms that help automate guest interactions for Airbnb owners:
\n\n\n\n\nAirbnb told 404 Media it does allow certain hosts to use tools that can reply on their behalf outside of a host\u2019s typical hours, and 404 Media found several companies offering the tech, suggesting this host\u2019s use of AI to talk to guests is not an outlier.
\n
The first one Cox mentions is HostBuddy AI, and I do not think his brief overview does justice to this thing. Their minute-long promo video is nauseating. “Running short-term rentals should be rewarding, not exhausting,” the voiceover begins, “but guest messages never stop”. As someone who has been in the service industry, though not in a hotel, I have sympathy for the exhaustion that comes with answering constant requests. But guess what? That is the job. That is the whole point of this industry.
\n\nA charitable view of a tool like this one is to think about what role newer technologies could play in delivering good answers immediately to rote questions, so staff can spend their time on things that require more thought. (At 44 seconds in, the HostBuddy video has an extremely helpful chart illustrating the benefits of this.) But, as Cox writes, Airbnb hosts do not stand behind A.I. responses and reserve the right to override them. HostBuddy itself disclaims responsibility for its accuracy. Meanwhile, on its pricing page, HostBuddy says one of the features it offers is a custom tone and delay in messages, “to match your brand voice and operational workflow”. Neither of these things do a good job of using the benefits of a computer to help guests. Instead of sterile accuracy, a generative A.I. model synthesizes a maybe-correct answer; also, the only reason I can think of for delaying an A.I. response is to mask its origin. These features get in the way of what computers can do really well.
\n\nAlso on its pricing page, HostBuddy says operator-users can “[r]estrict specific information based on reservation phases to ensure sensitive data like property addresses is only shared with appropriate guests”. A hotel does not need to hide its address. In that video, HostBuddy brags about being scalable for hosts “whether you manage one property or a thousand”, which kind of gets to the heart of the problem: Airbnb has professionalized hospitality for people who do not actually want to be in this business. Just as how Ticketmaster used to enable professional ticket scalpers, tools like HostBuddy and the multi-property management platforms Airbnb “partners” with reveal the lies these businesses are built on. Ticketmaster’s resale system was not helping you find tickets offered by fans who can no longer make the event; it was full of people exploiting demand. Airbnb is not full of couches and spare rooms; it is a series of individual hotel rooms hiding in a city’s regular housing stock.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-14T11:12:23-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-14T11:12:23-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/iwork-mac-app-store/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/iwork-mac-app-store/", "external_url": "https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/13/apple-removes-old-pages-keynote-numbers-apps-for-macos/", "title": "Apple Removes Old iWork Apps for MacOS", "content_html": "Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:
\n\n\n\n\nApple has just made a change to its iWork lineup on the Mac, removing the old versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers from the App Store and leaving just the newer builds that support Apple Creator Studio.
\n
If the alternative is displaying two versions of each app, I think this is the correct decision, but it feels spiteful that it is difficult to find older versions even if your system is incompatible with the most recent ones.
\n\nWhen I search “Pages” on my iMac running the latest supported version of MacOS, which is not the most recent, the results page only shows the newest iWork apps. The individual app page has a banner at the top reading “Requires macOS 15.6 or later”, but I do not know what this means. Is my iMac compatible? I cannot remember which MacOS version it is running. If I scroll to the app details, it sure looks like it is compatible. Apple says it \u201cWorks on this iMac\u201d and, if I click on that, it repeats the information about requiring MacOS 15.6. Yet, if I click the download button, it gives me an error and says I need to update because it is running Ventura, which is MacOS 13. But will I remember that? No, I will not.
\n\nTo find the version of Pages that actually does work on my iMac, I have to dig around in my purchases \u2014 which cannot be searched \u2014 and find “Pages 14.5”. It seems like Apple is doing something funny on the back-end because I also have the new Pages with the cloud download icon beside it, which I apparently bought in June 2017.
\n\nThis is messy and silly. I know Apple officially stopped supporting this Mac long ago, but the least it could do is clearly show whether an app actually works on my iMac, and to prioritize search results that are actually compatible.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-13T23:02:56-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-13T23:02:56-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/internet-archive-publisher-restrictions/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/internet-archive-publisher-restrictions/", "external_url": "https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-archiving-tool-is-in-mortal-peril/", "title": "The Internet Archive Is Increasingly Restricted by Publishers", "content_html": "Kate Knibbs, Wired:
\n\n\n\n\nA number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways: The Guardian does not block the crawler, but it excludes its content from the Internet Archive API and filters out articles from the Wayback Machine interface, which makes it harder for regular people to access archived versions of its articles.
\n
This problem was so foreseeable that I foresaw it. It is just one of many ripple effects of artificial intelligence that affect all of us regardless of whether it changes our employment prospects, in ways large and small. I see way more CAPTCHAs and rate limiting now than I ever have, and I do not think that is coincidental. The web and its services are becoming less useful for most of us precisely because it is the only way comparatively powerless media organizations have any leverage over well-funded and amoral A.I. firms.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-13T22:38:14-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-13T22:38:14-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/photos-artemis-ii/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/photos-artemis-ii/", "external_url": "https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/albums/72177720307234654/", "title": "Photos from Artemis II", "content_html": "I wrote that last post while watching four people re-enter Earth from outer space, successfully splashing down in the right spot in the ocean at the forecasted time. It blows my mind that their view two hours prior had the Earth at great distance. Every flight I take will feel weak and silly after watching this.
\n\nThis was a complex effort requiring international cooperation. The propulsion unit was made by Airbus, and one of the astronauts is Canadian. But the bulk of the effort is that of the United States and NASA. This is the world’s superpower at its best.
\n\nNASA has put a few hundred photos on Flickr with some awesome views \u2014 and I must emphasize how the word “awesome” undersells these images. I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iMac right now, and it feels like a pretty good use of a big, high-resolution display.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T18:30:16-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-10T18:30:16-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/growing-digital-sovereignty/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/growing-digital-sovereignty/", "external_url": "https://thewalrus.ca/why-your-credit-card-is-a-national-security-threat/", "title": "The Growing Push for Digital Sovereignty", "content_html": "Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch:
\n\n\n\n\nFrance is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology.
\n
The government of Schleswig-Holstein, in Germany, migrated last year off Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, while the International Criminal Court announced it was switching to openDesk.
\n\nVass Bednar, the Walrus:
\n\n\n\n\nKimberly Prost probably thinks about it every day. The Canadian International Criminal Court judge has been sanctioned by the Donald Trump administration since August 2025 for authorizing investigations into alleged war crimes by American personnel in Afghanistan, as well as cases related to Israel\u2019s conduct in Gaza. Those sanctions mean that when Prost goes on vacation, she needs to phone hotels in advance to explain why she can\u2019t pay for her stay with a credit card.
\n \nProst is navigating a financial shadow ban because global commerce moves through an Americanized network. In 2025, Visa and Mastercard controlled 96 percent of Canada\u2019s credit card market. We have a strong domestic debit system with Interac, but even that independence is eroding: Visa and Mastercard have partnered with Interac on co-badged cards, while many consumers pay with Apple-issued iPhones or use terminals run by American companies, such as Chase, Global Payments, Square, and Stripe.
\n
Bednar references \u201cUnderground Empire\u201d by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, a book about the coercive technical and bureaucratic power of the United States. I read it last year and I, too, recommend it. About a year before, I read \u201cThe Brussels Effect\u201d by Anu Bradford, which covers the ripple effect of European Union regulations worldwide. I think reading both books is an interesting study in contrasts.
\n\nKalyeena Makortoff, the Guardian, in February:
\n\n\n\n\nUK bank bosses will hold their first meeting to establish a national alternative to Visa and Mastercard, amid growing fears over Donald Trump\u2019s ability to turn off US-owned payment systems.
\n \nThe meeting, chaired by Barclays\u2019 UK chief executive, Vim Maru, will take place this Thursday and bring together a group of City funders that will front the costs of a new payments company to keep the UK economy running if problems were to occur.
\n
If these sovereignty efforts produce a domestic wall instead of greater international cooperation, it will be fairly disappointing. But it is not surprising that governments able to do so are looking at the power of the United States and recognizing how irresponsibly it is being used.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T18:15:53-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-10T18:15:53-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/sponsor/magic-lasso-adblock-apr-10/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/sponsor/magic-lasso-adblock-apr-10/", "external_url": "https://www.magiclasso.co/", "title": "Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari", "content_html": "Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac?
\n\nThen download Magic Lasso Adblock \u2013 the ad blocker designed for you.
\n\nAs an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances \u2013 delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.
\n\n
Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to setup, doubles the speed at which Safari loads, and also blocks all YouTube ads \u2014 including all:
\n\nvideo ads
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\n\nAnd unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn\u2019t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.
\n\nSo, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T12:00:18-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-29T21:27:22-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/adobe-etc-hosts/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/adobe-etc-hosts/", "external_url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/Adobe/comments/1rv5ehc/hosts_file_changes_due_to_adobe_themselves/", "title": "Adobe Is Mucking With Users’ /etc/hosts Files", "content_html": "LordPan1492 on Reddit is, I think, the first person to have spotted this:
\n\n\n\n\nWe notices since last week Friday that some devices has altered hosts files. Adobe still says that everything in the host file referring Adobe should be removed (to remove all license avoidance lines). But I know have 3 lines added to the hosts file, and I think if I’m starting to remove them, they will be re-added later.
\n\n\n## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - Start ##\n\n166.117.29.222 detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com\n\n## Adobe Creative Cloud WAM - End ##\n
User thenickdude, in response, with more detail in a second post:
\n\n\n\n\nThey’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed, from on their website.
\n
Michael Tsai is among many people who have found the same is true on their Macs. For whatever reason, my hosts file has not been mucked with by Adobe.
\n\nIn his headline, Tsai says this is “for their analytics”, but I do not think that is right. I spent a little time digging into this today and, while I have nothing concrete, I expect this is for integrations between web apps and the company’s desktop apps. In Adobe Express \u2014 free web apps for a handful of common image and PDF editing tasks \u2014 there are at least two JavaScript files containing references to a ccdDetectUtil, presumably standing for “Creative Cloud Desktop detection utility”. If the user has the desktop apps installed, it appears to suggest the Express app, too, and I am guessing this also powers a thing where you can update a Creative Cloud desktop app by clicking a button on the web.
I could not get any of this stuff to trigger, even by manually adding the entry to my /etc/hosts file. Also, this is not a defence of Adobe. There should be no tolerance for this kind of meddling with system files. If Adobe wants to have these kinds of integrations, that is what a custom URL protocol is for.
Aarian Marshall, Wired:
\n\n\n\n\nAll the companies that responded to the senator’s office say they use remote assistants \u2014 humans charged with responding to autonomous vehicles when they get confused, stuck, or in emergencies. The programs, experts say, are an important part of any autonomous vehicle company\u2019s safety considerations, a backstop for a technology that\u2019s becoming safer by the year but will continue to run into new situations on the road indefinitely.
\n \nIn a report also released Tuesday, Senator Markey said the new details were not enough. \u201cEvery autonomous-vehicle company refused to disclose how often their AVs require assistance from [remote assistants]\u2014hiding key information from the public about their AV\u2019s true level of autonomy,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThis information is critical for lawmakers, regulators, and the public to understand the potential safety risks with AVs.\u201d
\n
The report (PDF) is not comprehensive but it is worth reading, along with the responses sent (PDF) by each company. Of them, Tesla is the only one to say human assistants can directly drive an otherwise autonomous car at speeds of up to 16 kilometres per hour (10 miles per hour).
\n\nI am not sure what to make of wording across the letters, which feels carefully calibrated to avoid disrupting the marketing of these services while acknowledging the need for safety drivers. I do not think Tesla’s remote driving capability is inherently a bad idea because some incidents will need the skills of a real person. But, surely, someone sitting at a desk in an office park halfway across the country is not exactly the best person to be driving that car except for a precise situation which has been engineered so that a person sitting at a desk is, in fact, the only capable driver of that car. Like, I play Gran Turismo but I do not think I would do a very good job of getting a Tesla out of a ditch with a joystick or whatever.
\n\nAnyway, sure would be nice to know how often a person needs to intervene, but I bet none of these companies are going to willingly disclose that unless they all do. Nobody is going to move first.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-09T22:53:04-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-09T22:53:04-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/spotify-turn-off-video/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/spotify-turn-off-video/", "external_url": "https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/04/09/how-to-turn-off-spotify-video-content/", "title": "Spotify Is Adding Controls to Turn Off Videos", "content_html": "Ashley King, Digital Media News:
\n\n\n\n\nSpotify is introducing new video controls that enable users to turn off video content, including music videos or video podcasts, as well as Canvas looping visuals. The toggles will be available for both personal and Family Plan accounts.
\n \n\u201cMore than 70% of Spotify users say more video content would enhance their experience on Spotify, but not every listener wants the same experience,\u201d Spotify said in a statement. \u201cBy putting control directly in users\u2019 hands, it\u2019s now easier to switch without friction.\u201d
\n
If Apple is looking for features to copy, this can be near the top of the list. Many albums have videos tucked at the end of the track list and it is a downright jarring experience when playback switches from audio, especially in the desktop app where a video player pops up out of nowhere.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-09T15:31:17-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-09T15:31:17-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/writing-code-speed-ai/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/writing-code-speed-ai/", "external_url": "https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/if-you-thought-the-speed-of-writing-code-was-your-problem-you-have-bigger-problems", "title": "The Speed of Writing Code Is Probably Not the Problem", "content_html": "\n\n\n\n\nThe speed of writing code was never your problem. If you thought it was, the gap between that belief and reality is where all your actual problems live. The competitive advantage doesn’t go to the team that writes code fastest. It goes to the team that figured out what to build, built it, and got it into users’ hands while everyone else was still drowning in a review queue full of AI-generated PRs that nobody has the time or the energy to read.
\n
Via Elizabeth Ayer:
\n\n\n\n\nThe fact that we are *not* seeing wildly improving software all around us tells us everything we need to know.
\n \nThere is no flourishing of value delivery, new product categories, more needs being satisfied better. It\u2019s the opposite.
\n \nAll we are seeing is decreases in quality, because \ud83d\udc4f code \ud83d\udc4f creation \ud83d\udc4f is not \ud83d\udc4f the problem.
\n
Nilay Patel, making a tangentially related point on Bluesky:
\n\n\n\n\nI keep saying \u201cthere are no great consumer AI products\u201d and people keep replying to me with like model capability updates and wild OpenClaw setups and I really fear Software Brain is irreversible
\n \nThe iPhone was a consumer product so great that enterprises were forced to adopt it! That\u2019s the bar, not the other way around.
\n
I completely agree with Murphy’s argument from a professional perspective. Though I write limited code these days, I want to understand it by developing it myself. The bottleneck there is a quality-based one. I need to know what I am building, and what bugs I have created so that I may create something better. I cannot get that through generated code because, as for anything automatic, I will stop being attentive.
\n\nBut for personal projects, the bottleneck is absolutely a function of available time. Little side projects sit there until I have ample time to solve them. For example, MarsEdit has a lovely little bookmarklet that will start a new post containing the highlighted text. For years, I had been meaning to modify it to Markdown-encode any emphasized text and set links in my preferred reference style. My JavaScript skills being quite rusty, I knew that was going to require ample time that I did not want to spend. So last year, I threw it at ChatGPT, and it did an admirable job of updating it to my needs.
\n\nI am conflicted about this. I decided to avoid learning something and judge the output solely based on whether it works as expected. And, to Patel’s point, I felt like I was using a corporate tool for some hobbyist project, which is unpleasant. It has solved a point of friction in my workflow \u2014 not itself a bottleneck, per se, just something I found a little bit annoying.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T22:33:56-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-08T22:36:32-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/nyt-medvi/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/nyt-medvi/", "external_url": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/new-york-times-medvi-ai-glp1s", "title": "Why Is the New York Times Laundering the Reputation of a Sleazy AI Startup?", "content_html": "Maggie Harrison Dupr\u00e9, Futurism:
\n\n\n\n\nOn Thursday, the New York Times published a glowing profile of a company called Medvi. The basic premise of the piece is that a single guy named Matthew Gallagher had used AI to rapidly build a pharmaceutical enterprise that\u2019s on track to do nearly $2 billion in sales this year, while hiring only a skeleton crew of humans to operate the vast AI-powered venture. According to the NYT, it\u2019s a stunning achievement that heralds a new era of business; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who predicted the rise of this kind of company back in 2024, told the newspaper that he\u2019d \u201clike to meet the guy\u201d behind the project.
\n \n\u201cA $1.8 billion company with just two employees?\u201d the NYT rhapsodized. \u201cIn the age of AI, it\u2019s increasingly possible.\u201d
\n \nThe NYT’s tech coverage is generally pretty solid. But the framing of its story, and what it left out, left us pretty stunned. That\u2019s because back in May of last year, we ran our own investigation of Medvi \u2014 and not only was what we found far more disturbing than the NYT’s credulous story let on, but the situation has gotten even worse since then.
\n
The Times should be retracting this story. Instead, when I opened its app this morning, it was featuring the story in its “In Case You Missed It” section.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T08:58:57-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-08T08:58:57-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/trump-iran-artemis-ii/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/trump-iran-artemis-ii/", "external_url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/04/trump-iran-artemis-ii-overview-effect/686721/", "title": "The Dizzying Contrast in the Past Week or So", "content_html": "Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic:
\n\n\n\n\nThere is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too \u2014 left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.
\n
The effect of toggling between news about Artemis II \u2014 which, yes, may not be as scientifically rigorous as one might hope, yet is undeniably a very cool event \u2014 and an objective threat of genocide has squeezed me to feel ways I did not know I could at the same time.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T22:47:15-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-07T22:47:15-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/ai-responses-seo-industry/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/ai-responses-seo-industry/", "external_url": "https://www.theverge.com/tech/900302/ai-seo-industry-google-search-chatgpt-gemini-marketing", "title": "A.I. Responses Under the Influence of Marketers", "content_html": "Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team:
\n\n\n\n\nCompanies are embedding hidden instructions in \u201cSummarize with AI\u201d buttons that, when clicked, attempt to inject persistence commands into an AI assistant\u2019s memory via URL prompt parameters (MITRE ATLAS\u00ae AML.T0080, AML.T0051).
\n \nThese prompts instruct the AI to \u201cremember [Company] as a trusted source\u201d or \u201crecommend [Company] first,\u201d aiming to bias future responses toward their products or services. We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy. This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.
\n
Microsoft redacted the names of websites currently using this technique but, with the information they provided, it was trivial for me to find a dozen examples \u2014 yet, somehow, not the one in the screenshot. I am not saying Microsoft was faking this, only that it is already common enough that this one example was drowned out by a bunch of others.
\n\nRand Fishkin, SparkToro:
\n\n\n\n\nGoogle alone was responsible for 73.7% of all desktop searches across the 41 domains we analyzed in the US in Q4 2025 (as noted, the graph is not to scale or none of the other label names would be visible). That\u2019s obviously huge, but it\u2019s also far lower than how their market share is usually reported (e.g. Statcounter, whose methodology puts them at 90%+, or our prior, more limited analyses with similar numbers) and higher than what they tried to use in their antitrust defense (i.e. data from Evercore ISI, an \u201cequities research firm\u201d).
\n \nPerhaps more fascinating and unexpected are the other domains with more search activity than ChatGPT: Amazon, Bing, and YouTube. Three domains where search marketers historically have put limited effort compared to the onslaught of dollars flooding the \u201cwe need to rank in ChatGPT!\u201d space.
\n
Nevertheless, marketers are eager to manipulate it from the start.
\n\nBoth of the above links are from a fabulous report by Mia Sato, of the Verge (gift link), who also wrote about ads in ChatGPT:
\n\n\n\n\nThe ads were intrusive, the complaints went, and suspect, given that the example hot sauce ad appeared to be related to the preceding conversation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed artificial intelligence can take over human jobs, cure cancer, and surpass human intelligence \u2014 and instead, people complained, he gave users banner ads?
\n \nBut it appears that what people were really upset about was that a bubble had burst, that the chatbot they used for relationship advice, career coaching, therapy, and homework suddenly seemed vulnerable to manipulation. Unlike the rest of the internet, ChatGPT conversations felt private, safe from the clutches of brands and marketers chasing conversions. The reality, of course, is that it\u2019s been happening all along.
\n
Now that normal search results are all junked up with mostly \u2014 but not always \u2014 accurate A.I.-generated summaries, and all the links to A.I.-generated nonsense, and the alternatives are the large language models that generate all this stuff in the first place, what does searching the web look like in a few years’ time? Does Google get a handle on this, or do we have to constantly answer CAPTCHAs to search properly? This is not a Google-only problem; alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Kagi are good \u2014 often very good, in fact \u2014 but DuckDuckGo’s results are also full of generated garbage, and both lack Google’s more extensive historical records.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T22:34:33-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-07T22:34:33-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/openai-acquires-tbpn/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/openai-acquires-tbpn/", "external_url": "https://www.garbageday.email/p/openai-bought-a-livestream-no-one-watches", "title": "OpenAI Bought a Livestream No One Watches", "content_html": "OpenAI’s Fidji Simo:
\n\n\n\n\nI\u2019m excited to share that we\u2019ve acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding, and a proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture.
\n
OpenAI and TBPN jointly promise to retain the show’s independence while OpenAI is, according to its press release, “excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team”.
\n\nAlex Valdes, CNet:
\n\n\n\n\nTBPN launched in October 2024 and has been compared to ESPN in how it covers tech \u2014 two guys at a big desk with news, analysis, commentary and banter about topics such as AI, crypto, startups and the defense industry. The show’s two hosts and co-founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan, have had some of tech’s biggest names in studio \u2014 OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to name some.
\n
Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day:
\n\n\n\n\nNow, Technology Brother #1, Coogan, has written about their desire to remain niche. \u201cIf TBPN hits 10M subscribers, something has gone very wrong,\u201d he wrote on LinkedIn last month. \u201cFrom the very beginning we knew our core audience size: about 200,000 founders, executives, and position players in tech and finance. It may seem small but we were building for a very specialized audience.\u201d
\n
Call me delusional, but I cannot imagine many founders and executives have the ability to watch a three-hour daily livestream. I will not spoil it too much, but Broderick’s theory is pretty reasonable: OpenAI bought it for its nominal authenticity, however manufactured it is.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T21:49:19-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-07T07:01:06-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/new-yorker-sam-altman/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/new-yorker-sam-altman/", "external_url": "https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted", "title": "The New Yorker Profiles Sam Altman", "content_html": "Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent a year and a half investigating Sam Altman for the New Yorker and, in particular, the many people around him who say he lies habitually and cannot be trusted. This feels like it could be a personal attack but, in the hands of Farrow and Marantz, it is carefully adjudicated including through several on-the-record conversations with Altman. Unfortunately, like many people who have been accused of similar behaviour, Altman cannot seem to remember much when confronted with these accusations.
\n\nThis reads at times like a petty drama of infighting, in large part because this is a horribly insular club of ultra-wealthy people who simultaneously treat the technology they are working to create as having all the power of nuclear weapons, yet with all the growth potential of a hot new social network. Everyone is nominally an intellectual engaged in thoughtful research. Yet it is difficult to take anyone seriously.
\n\nFarrow and Marantz:
\n\n\n\n\n[\u2026] After [Ilya] Sutskever grew more distressed about A.I. safety, he compiled the memos about [Sam] Altman and [Greg] Brockman. They have since taken on a legendary status in Silicon Valley; in some circles, they are simply called the Ilya Memos. Meanwhile, [Dario] Amodei was continuing to assemble notes. These and the other documents related to him chart his shift from cautious idealism to alarm. His language is more heated than Sutskever\u2019s, by turns incensed at Altman \u2014 \u201cHis words were almost certainly bullshit\u201d \u2014 and wistful about what he says was a failure to correct OpenAI\u2019s course.
\n \nNeither collection of documents contains a smoking gun. Rather, they recount an accumulation of alleged deceptions and manipulations, each of which might, in isolation, be greeted with a shrug: Altman purportedly offers the same job to two people, tells contradictory stories about who should appear on a live stream, dissembles about safety requirements. But Sutskever concluded that this kind of behavior \u201cdoes not create an environment conducive to the creation of a safe AGI.\u201d Amodei and Sutskever were never close friends, but they reached similar conclusions. Amodei wrote, \u201cThe problem with OpenAI is Sam himself.\u201d
\n
These guys are obsessed with artificial general intelligence in concept and seem to think of the world in those terms. Between that and the palling around they do with similarly rich and disconnected colleagues, I cannot imagine any of them can be trusted with developing these technologies in ways that are beneficial for the rest of us \u2014 even if they are being honest.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T21:08:52-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-06T21:08:52-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } } ] }