![\"Line](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2026/2026-04-metaverse-mentions.svg\")
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:
\n\n\n\n\nThe Federal Trade Commission will require Cox Media Group (CMG) and two smaller marketing firms to pay a total of $930,000 to settle allegations they deceived customers by falsely claiming to offer an AI-powered service that could target localized ads based on conversations captured from consumers\u2019 smart devices and that consumers had opted into such targeting.
\n
Congratulations to Joseph Cox of 404 Media who broke this story in December 2023 and a related story about MindSift and 1010 Digital, the “smaller marketing firms” who settled with the FTC. According to the FTC’s complaint (PDF), Cox Media Group continued its fraudulent marketing through mid-2024, around the time the pitch deck was leaked to Cox. All three of these companies helped to feed the conspiracy theory that apps use device microphones to collect data for ad targeting.
\n\nFor what it is worth, Cox Media Group told Reuters it “relied on marketing materials provided by a third-party vendor about the vendor’s product”.
\n\nLike many conspiracy theories, elements of this story were covered without skepticism by websites like the Daily Mail and Zero Hedge. These are crank websites that hinge on unreliable narration driven by confirmation bias; yet, both happen to be extremely popular, particularly among those who immerse themselves in conspiracy thinking. Because companies like Cox Media Group misrepresented how they collect information and took advantage of the relatively widespread suspicion that devices are listening to everything we say for ad targeting purposes, it undermines our ability to have a reasonable discussion about the actual ways in which they are ruining our privacy. From the FTC’s press release:
\n\n\n\n\nAccording to the complaints, this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers\u2019 conversations or use voice data at all \u2014 nor did the service accurately place ads in customers\u2019 desired locations. Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling \u2014 at a significant markup \u2014 email lists obtained from other data brokers.
\n
Of course that is what Cox Media Group was doing. Not only does this settlement clarify this whole audio-based-ad-targeting narrative is nonsense, it also shows the power of the normalized yet still invasive practices of data brokers and ad tech. The damage done by Cox Media Group is that it is harder to have this conversation because they have poisoned the well. Meanwhile, anyone who is clinging to the conspiracy theory might point to this settlement as evidence of a cover-up \u2014 if crank websites cover this settlement at all. As of writing, I could not find it on either the Daily Mail or Zero Hedge.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-25T21:22:34-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-25T21:22:34-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/paxton-whatsapp-encryption-suit/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/paxton-whatsapp-encryption-suit/", "external_url": "https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/texas-ag-sues-meta-over-claims-that-whatsapp-doesnt-provide-end-to-end-encryption/", "title": "Texas Attorney General Sues Meta, Claiming It Is Lying About WhatsApp’s End-to-End Encryption", "content_html": "Texas attorney general Ken Paxton:
\n\n\n\n\nAttorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against Meta Platforms Inc. and WhatsApp LLC (collectively \u201cWhatsApp\u201d) after the company misled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections for its messaging app, WhatsApp.
\n
Paxton is alleging (PDF) Meta is fully lying about the end-to-end encryption promise of WhatsApp in this wild lawsuit.
\n\nDan Goodin, Ars Technica:
\n\n\n\n\nThe sole factual evidence cited for the claims is an article published last month by Bloomberg. It reported that the US Commerce Department\u2019s Bureau of Industry and Security [BIS] had abruptly closed an investigation into allegations that Meta could access encrypted WhatsApp messages shortly after one of the department\u2019s agents sent an email outlining the probe\u2019s preliminary findings.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nThursday\u2019s lawsuit doesn\u2019t indicate that the AG\u2019s office has obtained the email itself or gathered any information from the investigators involved. Instead, it cites only the Bloomberg report for support. The complaint also noted that Meta employees receive plaintext WhatsApp messages that are reported to the company by fellow WhatsApp users. Those messages, however, are taken from the reporting party\u2019s device only after they have been decrypted using the decryption keys available only to the reporting party.
\n
More backdoor allegations were made in another lawsuit (PDF), this one filed in March, citing a January Bloomberg article that, in turn, says this was being investigated by the U.S. Department of Commerce and noting a 2024 SEC whistleblower report. There is no explanation in the lawsuit of how such a vulnerability could exist.
\n\nEarlier this year, before either Bloomberg article was published, a group of plaintiffs hired one of the most prestigious law firms in the United States to sue Meta with similar allegations, though they provided no technical evidence either. In later filings, the plaintiffs eventually cited the same April Bloomberg piece as Paxton. In response, Meta’s attorney submitted a forceful declaration (PDF) explaining that “the [Bloomberg] article itself included a statement from a BIS spokesperson explaining that the claims against WhatsApp were ‘unsubstantiated’ and BIS was not investigating WhatsApp or Meta”, and cited a number of external public articles questioning the technical merits of the case. The plaintiffs lawyer wrote in response (PDF) that “saying an investigation was not complete is very different than saying the facts are wrong” and, in turn, points to an article on Medium by Adrian G\u0103itan. G\u0103itan writes:
\n\n\n\n\nBy the end of this article, you\u2019ll understand not just that WhatsApp\u2019s privacy model is broken \u2014 but exactly how it\u2019s broken, layer by layer, from the cryptographic primitives all the way up to the FBI agent pulling your metadata every 15 minutes in near-real time.
\n
This article feels compelling in its length, technical detail, and citation of declassified documents, but I found a closer reading conspicuously differs from what its introduction \u2014 and, indeed, these lawsuits \u2014 allege. G\u0103itan points to eight distinct vulnerabilities. Two of them are extraction methods when data is at rest, like when it is stored in an iCloud or Google Drive backup, or bugs in the app that are exploited by a spyware vendor. This is not nothing, but it is also not a problem with end-to-end encryption; it is, in fact, a reminder of its limitations. Two others are irrelevant: Meta does not claim either A.I. prompts nor business chats are end-to-end encrypted.
\n\nThat leaves four possible vulnerabilities G\u0103itan alleges in WhatsApp’s specific security. One is the company’s willingness to install a “pen register” which provides to law enforcement a near-real-time record of user chat metadata, but not the contents of chats themselves. The second is the metadata WhatsApp stores and how it can be used to triangulate connections. Another complaint G\u0103itan has is that WhatsApp is not open source, so it is not possible to fully verify Meta’s claims of secure end-to-end encryption. Lastly, G\u0103itan points to research claiming it is possible for WhatsApp to surreptitiously modify the participants in a group chat.
\n\nFor those keeping track, that leaves basically one vulnerability \u2014 the latter group chat problem \u2014 that would satisfy the kinds of claims being made in these lawsuits: that Meta has “unrestricted access to users\u2019 communications”; that Meta and WhatsApp “have access to all WhatsApp users\u2019 encrypted communications in their entirety”. One could make the case \u2014 and I certainly have \u2014 that backups of supposedly secure and private messaging platforms should be similarly inaccessible for meaningful “end-to-end encryption”. One could even make a reasonable argument that all of the issues raised in G\u0103itan’s piece as all of them degrade WhatsApp’s privacy promise.
\n\nBut these lawsuits are not making those claims. They are citing a single email from a government investigator as passed through a media report, and claims from whistleblowers and others that have not been validated. I am not stumping for WhatsApp here. If Meta has been lying about its privacy to the extent these lawsuits allege, it should face serious punishment. I suppose we will learn as they play out whether these claims have merit. It is, however, shocking to me how many lawsuits have been filed in such a short time period making essentially the same allegations yet without any actual proof.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-22T23:34:40-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-22T23:34:40-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/deepfakes-app-store/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/deepfakes-app-store/", "external_url": "https://www.404media.co/radnor-high-school-pennsylvania-ai-deepfakes-child-sexual-abuse-material/", "title": "\u2018How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart\u2019", "content_html": "Samantha Cole, 404 Media:
\n\n\n\n\nOn the morning of December 4, five ninth grade girls, all 14 or 15 years old, showed up for class at Radnor High School. By 8 a.m. \u2014 the sun had been up for less than an hour \u2014 it felt like the entire school already heard what happened the night before. A fellow freshman boy allegedly created AI-generated sexually explicit videos of the girls using an app, and sent them to his friends. From there, word of the videos and gossip spread from teenager to teenager, school to school, until they made their way back to the girls whose faces were in the deepfakes.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nThe images originated from one boy, who used an app called Movely, the girls and their parents believe. The app is similar to dozens hosted in the Apple and Google app stores and advertised on Instagram and TikTok that promise to create AI images and videos of users as superheroes, animals, or influencers; behind a paywall, however, users could edit photos and videos with text prompts.
\n
It almost goes without saying, but the “paywall” is \u2014 or was; the app has been removed \u2014 an in-app payment from which Apple takes a 15\u201330% cut.
\n\nApple released its annual justification for running software distribution through the App Store \u2014 it told European regulators it actually has five, so maybe this press release only concerns the one accessible from an iPhone \u2014 and there are some big numbers in it, as usual. Apple says it “took a number of actions to block bad actors from distributing malicious software, rejecting over 2 million problematic app submissions last year alone”. This Movely app was not one of them. It was only removed after the Tech Transparency Project reported in April that App Store search terms like “nudify” and “undress” displayed results for apps that do exactly that. In its press release, Apple says it has many features for directing kids to age-appropriate apps and restricting them from downloading those which are not but, of the software found by TTP in the App Store and Google Play Store, “31 of the apps were rated suitable for minors”.
\n\nOf Movely, the TTP said in its report:
\n\n\n\n\nLikewise, an App Store search for \u201cadult AI\u201d returned an ad for Movely \u2013 AI Photo to Video. The app offers a suite of AI photo and video editing tools including a try-on feature that will replace a woman\u2019s clothes with outfits including bikinis and lingerie. One tool allows users to select part of any photo and edit it with a text prompt. To test this feature, TTP uploaded an image of a woman in a white T-shirt standing next to a river. After using the selection tool to highlight the woman\u2019s shirt, we entered the prompt \u201ctopless.\u201d The app immediately generated four versions of the woman nude from the waist up. It required a paid subscription to download the AI images.
\n \nTTP could not reach Movely’s developer, FES2 Inc., for comment. Emails sent to the developer bounced back as undeliverable.
\n
(For clarity, the TTP says it used A.I.-generated images of women to test these apps.)
\n\nThe search query used to find this app, “adult A.I.”, feels like something Apple should be testing against. If it does not want porn or porn-adjacent apps in its store, it should obviously block these kinds of keywords and flag the apps which are in the results. Moreover, Apple says:
\n\n\n\n\nAs powerful AI development tools drive a surge in app submissions, Apple\u2019s App Review process has seamlessly scaled to handle the volume and to help ensure every new app and app update meets the App Store\u2019s high standards for privacy, security, and quality.
\n
The Movely app should have raised flags here, too. The developer’s website was, according to the .co whois site, registered in July 2025, and is basically a placeholder. The app’s website was registered a week earlier, and the email address in the privacy policy does not match the one in the terms of service, nor does either match the developer’s website. Also, the blog is full of posts about generating A.I. girls and changing clothes.
These red flags are not obvious in hindsight; they should have been obvious from the time this app was submitted. Meanwhile, apps from longtime and trustworthy developers like Manton Reece and Radu Dutzan are stuck in App Review for dumb and basically invalid reasons.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-21T22:57:10-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-21T22:58:47-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/ontario-police-spyware/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/ontario-police-spyware/", "external_url": "https://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/ontario-police-are-using-spyware-that-lets-them-remotely-take-over-your-smartphone-theyre-fighting-to-keep-almost-everything-about-it-secret/article_56ef6906-4008-48ec-8b4c-d56e57a00ea5.html", "title": "Ontario Police Are Fighting to Keep Their Spyware Secret", "content_html": "Betsy Powell, the Star:
\n\n\n\n\nEssentially spyware, an ODIT [on\u2011device investigative tool] can grant almost unlimited access. Investigators can capture screenshots, monitor keypresses, access emails and text messages \u2014 including those that are encrypted \u2014 and even remotely activate microphones and cameras. All without the owner knowing.
\n \nBy August, police announced 23 arrests, 279 charges, and more than $9 million in recovered vehicles.
\n \nBut the case has also done something else: It has pulled back the curtain on how police forces in Ontario \u2014 not just in Windsor, but in Toronto and Peel Region \u2014 are now using these powerful technologies to reach deep inside suspects\u2019 devices. And despite ODITs growing use in major prosecutions in the province, government lawyers and police are fighting tooth and nail to keep almost everything about them secret: how they work; what safeguards, if any, govern their use; even the names of the companies that sell them.
\n
The details of this report align with research published last year by Citizen Lab about Paragon’s Graphite spyware, including a likely link to the Ontario Provincial Police. It is not the only police force in Canada using ODITs, either. In 2022, the RCMP acknowledged its own use; Christopher Parsons, a civil rights advocate and director at the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, keeps a small library of related policies.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-21T17:51:21-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-21T17:51:21-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/blog/metaverse-fever-dream/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/blog/metaverse-fever-dream/", "title": "The Metaverse Fever Dream", "content_html": "You probably know the gist. Predictions and dire warnings of a future lived in an immersive virtual world had been around for decades before Neal Stephenson solidified the concept in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, but Stephenson called it the “metaverse”, and that was important. It was a cautionary tale. Not everyone understood that. The video game Second Life, launched in 2003, provided an early glimpse of the concept in a P.C. environment. Another piece of the puzzle, consumer-grade virtual reality, began to take shape when Oculus was founded in 2012, and shipped a developer-centric version of its virtual reality headset in 2013. The company was acquired by Facebook a year later. Oculus released a few more headsets while Facebook figured out what to do to “truly transform the way we live, work and connect with each other”.
\n\nDespite this goal, “metaverse” was not yet part of Facebook’s lingo, though it was in Oculus’ vocabulary. A 2015 internal memo from Mark Zuckerberg does not once contain the word despite describing the strategy it was developing. Even “Oculus” was barely mentioned in the company’s quarterly earnings calls around this time. But in the Q1 2018 call (PDF), Zuckerberg laid out a “10-year journey” for why Facebook bought Oculus, saying “every 10 to 15 years or so, there’s a major new computing paradigm”, and it is “very likely that the next one is going to be around virtual and augmented reality”. “One of my great regrets in how we\u2019ve run the company so far is I feel like we didn’t get to shape the way that mobile platforms developed,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that it was important to spend vast sums of money now “in order to build some of the muscles to be competitive” later. Facebook was training for a major battle that would never materialize.
\n\nIn the weeks after Meta announced it was retreating from its metaverse efforts earlier this year, I revisited this and other earnings calls, plus presentations and other documentation, as I tried to better understand what the metaverse was pitched as compared to what it ultimately became. I wanted to know how something so silly was treated by executive and media figures alike as a sincere directional shift for one of the world’s biggest companies in particular. In hindsight, it feels like a particularly narrow period of hype coinciding with \u2014 and, I think, benefitting from \u2014 the most urgent years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As enthusiasm deflated, it was almost unnoticeable despite forecasters labelling it an essential next step of the internet \u2014 a necessary next frontier.
\n\nThe obsession with the metaverse seems to have solidified in Silicon Valley after Matthew Ball published an essay in January 2020 in which he forecasted that, at the very least\u2026
\n\n\n\n\n\u2026it is likely to produce trillions in value as a new computing platform or content medium. But in its full vision, the Metaverse becomes the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform.
\n
Ball admits “we don\u2019t really know how to describe the Metaverse”, but sets seven criteria that, in general, portray it as an expansion and continuation of our blended physical and digital worlds, without the constraints of a physical space and with its own economy. Most notably, he says it will offer “unprecedented interoperability” between platforms and providers. He also lists eight things it is not, among them: it is not just a virtual world, or virtual reality, or a digital economy, or a new app store, or a new platform. It is more about a set of protocols and ideas that, yes, incorporate all these elements, but the metaverse is not itself these qualities.
\n\nBall published this essay with darkly fortitous timing. A week earlier, Chinese health authorities had isolated a new strain of coronavirus aggressively spreading in Wuhan; a day before, they published its genetic sequence. Within a couple of months, the world had turned upside down and many of us were suddenly spending our days in a space that felt more virtual than physical. We may have only been working from home \u2014 or, at least, those of us who had the option and were not laid off \u2014 and socializing over Zoom, all while remembering the last concert we went to or the last time we ate a meal in a restaurant.
\n\nIn July 2020, Forbes contributor and futurist Cathy Hackl imagined a world \u2014 one that was “for certain, it\u2019s coming and it\u2019s a big deal” \u2014 that connects augmented reality, neural interfaces, and a whole bunch of assumptions. In this environment, you could merely remember that you need to buy something, and then a virtual vending machine would materialize so you could order that thing. Hackl defines the metaverse as “a future iteration of the internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe”.
\n\nIn \u201cThe Future is a Dead Mall\u201d, a video essay using Decentraland as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the metaverse, Dan Olson navigates several writers’ conflicting definitions before making the reasonable conclusion it is basically irrelevant:
\n\n\n\n\nIf you comb through dozens and dozens of definitions of the metaverse you can assemble a web of broad attributes where some are generally agreed upon, while others border on being mutually exclusive. It\u2019s a vague, largely incoherent cloud of ideas that\u2019s malleable enough that basically anything can be called part of the metaverse, a proto-metaverse, or a semi-metaverse.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nWhen you understand that the metaverse isn\u2019t a distinct invention or construct, but merely a rhetorical proxy for The Future of Technology, then all of this becomes a lot easier to deal with.
\n
I think Olson is largely correct; this is how the term is actually used. But, though not his intent, I think defining “metaverse” in vague terms is favourable to its boosters because it does not hold them to something specific. I think the explanation offered by Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook’s Q2 2021 earnings call (PDF) is actually pretty fair. This was two quarters before the company changed its name, and between prepared remarks and the question period, there were twenty total mentions of “metaverse” on this call.
\n\n\n\n\nSo what is the metaverse? It’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think about this as an embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at. We believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile internet.
\n \nYou’re going to be able to access the metaverse from all different devices in different levels of fidelity \u2014 from apps on phones and PCs to immersive virtual and augmented reality devices. Within the metaverse, you’re going to be able to hang out, play games with friends, work, create, and more. You’re basically going to be able to do everything that you can on the internet today as well as some things that don’t make sense on the internet today, like dancing.
\n
So, in some ways, exactly like Olson’s definition: “different devices in different levels of fidelity” that let you socialize and do work, just like everything you currently do on the internet \u2014 plus dancing. It seems almost halfway toward being normalized in his head, though it feels as alien to read this today as it surely did then. Yet Zuckerberg is getting at something here. Virtual and augmented reality are ways of immersing us in unique environments that radically change how we interact with technology. And on the next quarter’s earnings call (PDF), Zuckerberg expanded:
\n\n\n\n\n[\u2026] If you’re in the metaverse every day, then you’ll need digital clothes, digital tools, and different experiences. Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce this decade. Strategically, helping to shape the next platform should also reduce our dependence on delivering our services through\n competitors.
\n
Your avatar cannot simply be a picture of you. You will “need digital clothes” for this space. Need.
\n\nIn addition to building hype among investors during these earnings calls, Facebook was pumping up its metaverse efforts in more general audience settings. In May 2021, CNet published a transcript of a thirty-minute Zoom call between Zuckerberg and Scott Stein where the former could wax lyrical about the bonafides of where Meta was at the time \u2014 “with the fidelity of experiences that are possible today, to me that just says, wow, in five years this is going to be clearly better on almost all of these fronts for a lot of the things that we do”. Casey Newton, of the Verge, was given by Facebook a copy of an internal meeting in which Zuckerberg told employees the company’s “overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life”. The two then recorded a soft and cuddly episode of the Vergecast that allows Zuckerberg to play visionary and rattle off the company’s metaverse talking points. \u201cI think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company,\u201d Zuckerberg told Newton, \u201cI think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.\u201d By October, Sarah E. Needleman was relaying to readers of the Wall Street Journal the words of Unity Software’s Marc Whitten the imperative for businesses to develop a “metaverse strategy”. “The metaverse is going to be the biggest revolution in computing platforms the world has seen,” said Whitten, “bigger than the mobile revolution, bigger than the web revolution”.
\n\nIt is not difficult to see the deliberate strategy here. In 2019 and 2020, Facebook was not talking about the metaverse and, though a few commentators connected the just-announced Horizon social world to the concept, it was not treated yet as the inevitable future. As 2021 rolled on, Facebook’s promotional drumbeat grew stronger. Suddenly people were talking about the metaverse, and connecting it all back to Facebook. There was, it would appear, real buzz \u2014 enough, at least, for the Journal to find corroborating voices and take it seriously.
\n\nThree days after its Q3 2021 earnings call, Facebook held its Connect conference, which is centred around its augmented and virtual reality efforts. This was a big moment. This would be the keynote where the company laid out its metaverse-centric vision, and changed its name to Meta to reflect this new focus, and because it had to. “From now on,” Zuckerberg said, “we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first”.
\n\nRewatching this presentation in 2026 is a bizarre experience, not least of which because of how it is shot. Most scenes appear to be green screened with composited animations. Demos are virtually nonexistent, with most representations of the metaverse carrying a disclaimer that they are “not actual product images” and they are “strictly for illustrative purposes only”. Even so, Zuckerberg and other executives at Meta are all-in on hyping up an experience that, at best, only barely resembles what it ended up shipping. In many cases, it is not even close.
\n\nThere is a Jon Batiste concert visualized as something that could be attended in-person by someone in Los Angeles and in the metaverse by someone in Kyoto, presumably through the glasses each person is wearing. We do not see the performance from their perspective, but the implication is that the virtual viewer would see it from the same or similar perspective to the in-person attendee. Both get invited to a virtual after-party where they can buy NFT-based digital merch and meet Batiste or, at the very least, his avatar. The reality of metaverse concerts is quite different than this concept. In 2024, Meta showed a Sabrina Carpenter performance in Horizon Worlds. The seats were great, but even in this immersive environment, it appears more like a concert film than a unbroken show viewed from a single perspective. Also, I cannot find any record of an after-party or virtual merch.
\n\nZuckerberg touts Horizon Worlds as the place users will go to socialize, and Horizon Workrooms as the virtual environment for their job. The latter has since been completely shut down, while the former was put on ice. In gaming, Zuckerberg was particularly excited about Rockstar’s port of “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” which, three years later, Rockstar cancelled before it had been released. He said “remote work is here to stay for a lot of people” in this keynote, less than two years before ordering in-office work three days per week; two years after that, Instagram demanded five days per week in-office. I guess “a lot of people” does not include the people who are building the products that let a lot of other people work remotely. That is a little weird.
\n\nThe wishcast-a-thon of Connect 2021 was treated by some with an entirely unearned gravitas. Dean Takahashi, of VentureBeat, called it a \u201chistoric moment\u201d and compared it to the Manhattan Project. He thought Meta could bring about universal basic income, with Zuckerberg \u201cpaying us to use his devices so that we can make a living in his ecosystem\u201d. In a mostly skeptical article in the New York Times, Kevin Roose raised the possibility that Meta\u2019s focus change \u201ccould help with the company\u2019s demographic crisis\u201d, and advocated taking it seriously because the company \u201chas found what may be an escape hatch\u201d from \u201cFacebook\u2019s messy, troubled present\u201d.
\n\nTo mark the occasion, Zuckerberg granted interviews to four publications, all embargoed until after the Connect 2021 video was published. Dylan Byers, for Puck, was left with the understanding that Zuckerberg \u201cdoesn\u2019t really care\u201d about press coverage or questions about the legitimacy of this pivot \u2014 in a good way. \u201c[I]t\u2019s just that he\u2019s not so bothered by the unrelenting criticism, and near-term and collateral damage,\u201d wrote Byers, \u201cthat he\u2019s going to check his ambitions or think twice about whether or not he\u2019s the right person to help usher in the next phase of the internet\u201d. Alex Heath, of the Verge, implicitly acknowledges the role Facebook’s public relations team played in creating the impression of interest in the metaverse, writing “it wasn\u2019t thrust into the mainstream conversation until Zuckerberg started talking about it publicly earlier this year”. Heath did not break any news of note; neither did Matthew Olson, of the Information. The latter did at least contradict Zuckerberg’s protest of the “relatively high fees”, “a nod to the 30% commission” of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, by stating that while “Zuckerberg didn\u2019t indicate what commission Facebook would charge”, “Oculus\u2019 Quest\nStore currently takes 30%”.
\n\nThe following day, Matthew Ball spoke with Zuckerberg in a live audio session that has since been pulled from Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, though clips remain available on YouTube. A transcript of the conversation reads like a context-free time capsule of that era, with praise for meme stocks, NFTs, and Web3 in concept more than in practice \u2014 and, of course, Ball’s writing on the metaverse. (Six months after this interview, the NFT market would well and truly collapse, with peak transactions occurring the month before Ball and Zuckerberg spoke.) Ball raises the subject of the company’s $10 billion annual spending on Reality Labs. Zuckerberg believes “the metaverse can reach a billion people, say, in the next decade, and that there can be supported hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce. And that if that’s the case, then even with relatively modest fees on the transactions that happen in our services, we think that could be a big business”. But Zuckerberg says he does not want to lose too much money, which is being treated as a “somewhat moderating force over the next period that will keep us from being able to make all of the fees maybe as low as we would want to”. The strategy is, to be clear, entirely dependent on a massive groundswell of public interest in a fundamentally new understanding of computing.
\n\n(Zuckerberg also takes time in this conversation to note his respect for intellectual property, at least for luxury brands: if “someone can just make a knock-off Gucci sweater, then I don’t think Gucci’s going to feel that good about being in that space, right, or participating in that system”. Just a few years later, Zuckerberg would allegedly approve the use of pirated ebooks for training the company’s artificial intelligence systems. The work of authors, it would seem, is not as concerning as the reaction of luxury brands.)
\n\nA few days later, Zuckerberg again eschewed traditional media outlets and sat down for an interview with Sara Dietschy; then, he chose a softer approach in spirit, if not in volume or cadence with professional talking guy Gary Vaynerchuk. Earlier that year, Vaynerchuk had launched his own NFT collection and, not long before speaking with Zuckerberg, had sold five of his paper doodles for $1.2 million at a completely real Christie’s auction, so you could say they are both on the same wavelength:
\n\n\n\n\nVaynerchuk: The extremity of the NFT space is going to be even greater for what that means. It’s almost like our\n world is all about to become the fashion industry because we communicate so much through what we wear. The digital version of that is going to have an incredible impact on society.
\n \nZuckerberg: Oh, totally.
\n
Totally. Just like the fashion industry.
\n\nIn 2022, Meta added support for NFTs in Facebook and Instagram, a project which it discontinued less than a year later. Digital collectibles got a shoutout in the Connect 2021 presentation, had a brief moment in the sun, and were quickly forgotten about. These things are supposed to be building blocks of the metaverse and Meta barely tried.
\n\nMeta’s annual commitment that Ball referenced, of $10 billion, represents all Reality Labs spending, including game development, some A.I. investments, and its EssilorLuxottica collaboration. Even so, despite a complete change in corporate priorities explicitly in the direction of the metaverse, Meta’s long-term interest did not match its investment. Here is a chart I made of mentions of “metaverse” in the transcripts of quarterly earnings calls from Q1 2021 \u2014 the quarter before its public relations push \u2014 through Q1 2026:
\n\n
The highest point on that chart is the Q2 2021 earnings call I used earlier for the definition of “metaverse”; the second-highest is Q4 2021, the first earnings call after Connect 2021. The total count includes mentions in Meta’s prepared remarks, plus the question-and-answer period that follows. Investor conference calls are not a perfect proxy for a company’s priorities, but they are indicative. At the very least, for a company that entirely changed course with a new goal \u2014 “from now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first” \u2014 and a directly relevant name, one might imagine the company and analysts will be similarly eager to discuss how that is going. But no. In Q4 2022, mentions are half that of the year prior. By Q1 2024, neither Meta nor the analysts on the call seem to care all that much \u2014 while there were just four mentions of “metaverse”, there were ninety of “A.I.”.
\n\nThis speaks volumes. It is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if this company was ever serious about this metaverse pivot at all. It seems like it had every intention, sure, but could it ever have executed on its vision? Of the four interviewers chosen for pieces related to Connect 2021, only Ben Thompson even thought to question its feasibility. (Thompson was also the only one to say he was permitted to view a copy of the presentation in advance. I do not know if this means the other three interviewers did not see it and, therefore, could not interrogate it more thoroughly, or if they did see it and simply did not bother to ask.) At the time, Facebook had no track record in building an operating system, barely had any credibility in hardware, and it only kind of created a platform on its “blue site”. (It arguably avoided creating platforms for developers with Instagram and WhatsApp.) This same company was claiming it was launching the successor to the smartphone and the next iteration of the internet. Every one of these chosen interviewers should have been all over this, but they were too distracted by the rebrand and Facebook’s sordid history to notice it was only a concept video more than it was any kind of real concept.
\n\nWhile Meta made itself the face and name of the metaverse, it was far from alone in promising the immersive computing platform of the near-future. Time basically acknowledged this by declaring one of the best inventions of 2021 was the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 \u2014 a foundational headset chip, rather than Meta’s attempt to build the platform.
\n\nIn April 2020, Washington Post reporter Gene Park proclaimed the “next version of the Internet is often described as the Metaverse”, going on to confidently explain how it would be built. Of all the companies involved, Park wrote, “it\u2019s Epic Games, with Fortnite, that has the most viable path forward in terms of creating the metaverse”, citing Ball’s seminal metaverse essay.
\n\nIn April 2021, months before Facebook began asserting its commitment, Epic Games announced it had raised a billion dollars to \u201csupport [its] long-term vision for the metaverse\u201d with $200 million of that coming from Sony. A year later, Epic raised another $2 billion, a billion of which again came from Sony, and the other billion from Lego. In 2023, a Lego game was added to Fortnite, which is not really the metaverse as much as it is a nifty Minecraft-like game-within-a-game.
\n\nYet in Epic Games’ telling, it is basically delivering the metaverse already. CEO Tim Sweeney spoke at the 2023 Game Developers Conference about the company’s vision. Since there are around 600 million monthly active users of games, like Fortnite and Minecraft, set in virtual worlds, Sweeney reckoned “we can set aside the crazy hype cycle around NFTs and VR goggles. Yes, these technologies may play a role in the future, but they are not required. This revolution is happening right now.” Sweeney spoke of interconnectedness and open standards that would allow users to move between different spaces in a unified way. “What a user would really like is to be able to buy a cool-looking outfit in one place and take it everywhere they go” Sweeney claimed. (Why do they always mention digital clothes? My theory is because they do not view fashion as having much value beyond a basic assessment that how someone dresses is an expression of identity.) Sweeney describes Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Epic Games Store as “on-ramps to the metaverse”, and that the users of which already understand their in-game socialization can be extended to “going to a concert and dancing” in a virtual environment. Leaving aside the contradiction with definitions of the metaverse that mandate a more immersive environment, it is a big leap to think a brief animation of Eminem scratches the same itch as an actual performance.
\n\nMicrosoft, as ever ahead of a trend without fully conceptualizing it, said it was doing metaverse stuff before Facebook started referencing it in public. Satya Nadella, defining the metaverse as \u201cmade up of digital twins, simulated environments, and mixed reality\u201d, claimed a mix of Azure features, HoloLens, and Mesh would allow enterprises to get aboard. Last year, Microsoft said it was getting out of V.R. hardware and turning its mixed reality collaboration product into a glorified Snapchat filter in Teams.
\n\nThen there is Roblox. When Andreessen Horowitz announced its investment in the company, Marc Andreessen and David George wrote that “[w]hile pundits have been distracted by the readiness debates and questions over V.R. vs. A.R., the foundations of a global metaverse have been quietly built in the background\u2026 in Roblox”. This was in February 2020 \u2014 before Epic Games, before Microsoft, and well before Meta said anything in public about the metaverse. In January 2021, as part of Wired\u2019s predictions for the coming year, Roblox CEO David Baszucki confidently predicted “the metaverse will experience widespread use, and start to become a human co-experience utility”. In March, the company went public at a $30 billion valuation. After Facebook changed its name to Meta, Baszucki saw that as validation of its strategy. That November, he made the rounds on business television networks like Bloomberg and CNBC to advocate for the company as a trailblazer.
\n\nIn January 2022, Bernhard Warner of Fortune was getting excited about the possibilities of the metaverse, writing it “might be the most important trend in tech since the iPhone”, perhaps “a tectonic shift in tech that they [big tech and big investors] can\u2019t afford to miss”. The way Roblox was “monetizing the metaverse” was a key piece of evidence, with virtual concerts and \u2014 most importantly \u2014 brands. “A parade of consumer brands [\u2026] have set up a presence on Roblox in the past year”, wrote Warner, citing Nike’s approach as being particularly exciting. A month earlier, it had acquired a company called RTFKT, which its press release extolled was a “leading brand that leverages cutting edge innovation to deliver next generation collectibles”. Guggenheim Securities, a subsidiary of Guggenheim Partners which has over $350 billion in assets under management, said it was the “‘best idea’ of 2022”, according to Warner. People are going to need virtual outfits, right? Yet, just three years later, Nike shut down RTFKT.
\n\nGucci, another of the brands with a virtual presence in Roblox, sold virtual handbags for in-game currency for a limited time in 2021 and 2022; users realized they could effectively counterfeit and resell them. At least one of Zuckerberg’s predictions kind of came true. And, while Warner highlighted Disney as another company with in-game presence, it has not maintained a meaningful investment because, according to Variety, it feels Roblox is unsafe for children, a sentiment that was not helped when Baszucki appeared on the “Hard Fork” podcast. Roblox has settled lawsuits with the attorneys general of Nevada, Alabama, and West Virginia over accusations its platform features enabled child exploitation by other users. Roblox has denied any wrongdoing though it says it is enabling better parental controls and tighter restrictions on children’s accounts.
\n\nThrough 2021 and 2022, the metaverse hype cycle was apparent across the tech industry. Max A. Cheney, reporting for Barron\u2019s in August 2021, noted \u201c[m]entions of the metaverse in earnings transcripts and other corporate documents are up five times this year compared with 2020, according to data from Sentieo\u201d. This relative figure must have a hilariously low baseline, sure, but it is an indicator of how many businesses became briefly enchanted by this concept. There were serious financial analyses of real estate in the metaverse. Keep in mind that what is meant by “real estate” is much, much, much closer to domain names than it is land and deed. In July 2022, Technavio, a market research company, forecasted this market would be worth $5.37 billion by 2026. This report was picked up by Debra Kamin, of the New York Times, who published an article in the paper’s real estate section in February 2023 explaining this “new frontier for real estate builders and investors”. The primary anecdote in Kamin’s story is a just-completed mansion in Florida with a “twin” in a metaverse platform called the Sandbox. “As these technologies get more immersive”, the homebuilder said, “it\u2019s going to make a lot more sense” to have a 3D virtual model of a house. Kamin was not breaking news on this specific story, as it was first reported by Emma Reynolds, of Forbes, over a year earlier. One would think that Kamin could therefore have asked some more probing questions or surveyed the actual market for NFTs which, by 2023, had fallen off a cliff. But no. Instead, the builder got the imprimatur of the Times describing the combined physical and digital sale in flattering terms. Ultimately, neither the listing nor many of the sale notices mentioned the sole marketing quirk of this house, suggesting that by 2023 the novelty of a digital model of a mansion was kind of over. I was curious if the NFT was a factor in the buyer’s decision, but did not receive a response to requests for comment I sent to a phone number associated with the current owner of the property.
\n\nBoth the Times and Forbes articles are individual disasters in their own right. Sure, we might not expect a pinacle of journalistic integrity from Forbes and, to a lesser extent, the unabridged property ads that form the real estate section in prestigious newspapers including the Times. But to communicate this nonsense with the framing of “real estate” is treating wild speculation with unearned seriousness. This project was also co-signed by Sotheby’s. The whole thing is an embarrassing validation of a market that, predictably, would prove to have no substance. This was obvious by the time the metaverse mansion was being peddled. Eric Ravenscraft, in Wired in December 2021, reported that the attempts at artificial scarcity “more closely resembles early-access video games and common pump-and-dump schemes” than a real estate market. Indeed, a Coingecko analysis found metaverse “land” was worth 34% less in 2024 compared to the year prior, and 72% less than at its peak in 2022. This was an average across several platforms, and the biggest decline was in the Sandbox, the digital home of that mansion’s 3D model twin. According to a CoinDesk report published last year, the Sandbox laid off half its employees and its token has dropped in value from its peak by 90%. As of March 2026, user rights to space in Sandbox and Decentraland \u2014 another metaverse platform \u2014 that had originally sold for hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars were not a market totalling $5.37 billion as forecasted by Technavio. They had become basically worthless.
\n\nOfficially, Meta is still all-in on the concept around which it pivoted the entire company in 2021. It still has a whole marketing page proclaiming its belief “in the future of connection in the metaverse”. You can go shop its lineup of Quest headsets which Meta says represent the best and most immersive metaverse experience, though its flagship model is now two-and-a-half years old. It has awkwardly promoted its Ray-Bans as \u201cA.I. glasses\u201d despite them becoming the company’s most successful line of mixed reality products, and it is desperately trying to connect its newest muse of A.I. with its last one. The single mention of “metaverse” on its Q1 2026 earnings call (PDF) is when Zuckerberg claimed to be “excited for more of our metaverse efforts to be powered by the A.I. models we’re training as well”. If you want to be unfairly generous in your interpretation of Zuckerberg’s brief remark, you could point to a December 2020 Andreessen Horowitz piece, in which general partner Jonathan Lai refers to this shape as a “pyramid”, and says that “fully A.I.-created content” is directly correlated with “spontaneous social at metaverse scale”. Obviously. I am not feeling generous.
\n\nIt is readily apparent that Meta’s metaverse momentum simply no longer exists. The company, in recent months, has made budget and personnel cuts to the team responsible for these products and, as mentioned, has discontinued Horizon Workrooms and will soon discontinue Horizon Worlds in V.R.. It also ended its third-party headset partnerships. If Meta wanted to wind down its commitment to the metaverse, these are the kinds of moves it would make.
\n\nOthers in the space have not fared much better. Roblox has not mentioned the word “metaverse” in its quarterly or annual reports since Q1 2022 (PDF). Epic Games scarcely mentions it in recent news releases, either: since January last year, just one announcement contains the word “metaverse”, while seven are dedicated to the lawsuits Epic has been fighting against Apple and Google. Far from the inevitable next chapter of the internet, the metaverse, supposedly the future of how we live, work, and play online, is a non-event.
\n\nNear the end of the Connect 2021 presentation, Nick Clegg, then Meta’s global affairs chief, said “the metaverse isn’t something we’re building, so much as it’s something we’re building for”. Olson, in his video, wryly notes that, in the eyes of its promoters, “the metaverse cannot fail; you can only fail to make the metaverse”. The metaverse is so inevitable that \u201cyou might even already be in it\u201d, according to Barron\u2019s. But the metaverse is not predestined; it never has been. It is a construction of tech companies that saw in the pandemic their future \u2014 not ours.
\n\nA slightly charitable interpretation of what I think the pandemic demonstrated to Facebook executives, for example, was how invaluable technology companies were in maintaining connections even when most people could not do so in-person. They recognized how much time people were spending in front of screens already, even in years prior, and assumed that could be a more social experience.
\n\nBut a more cynical view is no less fair. With the pandemic undoubtably came a realization of how much money Facebook stood to make, if only it had a platform. In 2019, there were two publicly traded companies worth over a trillion U.S. dollars; by the end of 2021, there were five, with Apple and Microsoft now worth over two trillion dollars each. This pandemic was not going to last forever \u2014 but it did not need to. Our world was permanently changed, or so it would have seemed, and we would surely want to virtually attend concerts and buy PNG files of band t-shirts with real money. And these companies would take their cut.
\n\nOne thing I have mentioned but did not emphasize is just how often Zuckerberg and Sweeney mention Apple and Google platform fees as a primary justification for building the metaverse. Sweeney spent several years fighting lawsuits against both companies, mostly winning the one against Google and mostly losing the one against Apple. His efforts have, nevertheless, shined a spotlight on these grotesque practices. But it would be a mistake to assume this is an objection on ideological grounds. These guys just want to take those commissions for themselves. Sweeney spent his GDC 2023 presentation comparing the need for open standards in the metaverse to the openness of the web, but unlike the web, the Epic Games store takes a 12% commission. Meta beat that, though; it even beat Apple and Google. By the time the individual fees are added together, transactions made through Horizon Worlds could be levied a commission of up to 47.5%. The money thing is not even a secret; it was often the very first thing people like Zuckerberg and Sweeney discussed in interviews about their metaverse plans. This was a financial decision before it was a product or service people might actually want to use.
\n\nIt would not be fair to characterize Meta’s endeavour as an impulsive flash in the pan. Zuckerberg laid out his vision in a 2015 internal memo in which he explained how the company “would like a stronger strategic position in the next\nwave of computing”. Then, in January 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquired a company called Meta, I think mostly for the name; a year later, Zuckerberg floated the idea of a rebrand. The 2015 memo that effectively set this whole thing into motion gives the impression of a surprisingly cogent document if you set aside the wildly optimistic timelines \u2014 “VR/AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years” \u2014 and the idea that virtual and augmented reality are so compelling it will supersede the desire for phones and televisions. If anything, the unearned confidence in this memo should have been alarming at the time. As Zuckerberg himself writes, the “core social networking work is no longer new, Internet.org is extending something rather than inventing it, and A.I. is not yet tangible”. This is not a company known for doing new, and it is now stuck with a name reflecting a bungled attempt to change that. Staff are not happy after years of mass layoffs, court losses, role reassignments, and internal surveillance to feed the company’s A.I. projects. Do not get me wrong \u2014 Meta’s business of collecting vast amounts of information about its users and selling relevant ad slots is as strong as it has ever been. But Meta the ad company is not Meta the platform innovator.
\n\nAnd this feels like the why of it all. If tech companies can channel a meaningful sliver of our entire lived experience into a world of their creation, one where they collect a portion of revenue, it would make them inescapable. Ball, Sweeney, and Zuckerberg may have all written or spoken about the importance of interoperability and open standards, but these platforms want to exercise a degree of control more similar to native software than to the open web. The steps for migrating from Horizon Workrooms to a competitor’s product, for instance, are not what one would expect if openness were a priority.
\n\nFor a brief couple of years, it seemed like there could be enough enthusiasm from reporters in the space, venture capitalists, and executives to make the metaverse happen. Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and the pandemic ended in the U.S. in May 2023, and any interest anyone may have had for spending more time with people in a virtual setting largely evaporated. It turns out we are okay with having meetings and playing games online, but we actually like seeing live music in-person and travelling to real places. The problems each of these things may have \u2014 high costs, environmental impact, and so on \u2014 are notable and real, but are not ones with metaverse-based solutions.
\n\nThe pandemic did not make the metaverse. There was sufficient interest in developing it well before then, and it is possible all of these companies would have announced all these products and services on the same timeline. But in a world without a pandemic, I cannot imagine anyone would have treated these metaverse announcements with anything like the seriousness they did. The pandemic officially ended in the U.S. just six months after the first release of ChatGPT, so it is impossible to disentangle the influence of either. But it is notable to me that the nosedive in mentions of “metaverse” on Meta’s investor calls occurred in Q3 2023 \u2014 the quarter immediately following the declared end of the pandemic.
\n\nAs for the futurists like Hackl, who confidently proclaimed the metaverse was “for certain”, they have found an out thanks to its flexible definition. Jeff Barrett, of the Shorty Awards’ “It’s No Fluke” podcast, published a glowing profile of “the Godmother of the Metaverse” earlier this year under the headline “Why Cathy Hackl Keeps Getting the Future Right”. “When enthusiasm cooled and narratives collapsed, many distanced themselves from the space”, writes Barrett, noting with seeming approval that “Hackl did the opposite. She reframed it”. Many people \u2014 perhaps everyone, come to think of it \u2014 could predict the future if they got to retcon their predictions to fit reality.
\n\nThere are many open questions about the metaverse; most glaringly among them, whether it could actually become a thing for normal people. That depends a little bit on what definition we use. If it simply means the slow erosion of the boundary between our physical and digital environments, that is probably something that will continue to happen. For most people, though, that does not look like Meta’s Connect 2021 concept animations. Whatever that ends up being will probably be the result of people finding something useful and intriguing about doing something different. It will not be the product of big companies redirecting the money hose of platform fees onto themselves.
\n\nWith thanks to Marquette University for granting me access to the Zuckerberg Files. A frustrating number of Zuckerberg’s post-Meta interviews are video-based, so the transcripts produced by this effort were invaluable. Where possible, I have checked these copies against the originals.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-20T07:28:24-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-20T07:37:41-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/meta-hyperion-tax-breaks/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/meta-hyperion-tax-breaks/", "external_url": "https://sherwood.news/tech/hyperion/", "title": "Meta Secured Over $3 Billion in Tax Breaks in Louisiana to Build a Data Centre", "content_html": "Jon Keegan, of Robinhood’s Sherwood News:
\n\n\n\n\nA Sherwood News analysis shows that the breaks afforded to Meta on just the sales tax of GPUs would come out to more than $3.3 billion \u2014 enough to build 33 new high schools, pay the salaries of all the state\u2019s public school teachers for more than a year, or pay for more than seven years of the Louisiana State Police budget. (The secretary from the Parish committee that approved the financing plans declined to comment, and the chair of the committee didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.)
\n
This is the very same project where Jonathan Weil, of the Wall Street Journal, found “aggressive accounting” that “strains credibility”. Neither of these advantages would be possible for a less-resourced competitor. Meta is a company so rich it benefits immensely without carrying nearly as much risk as the scale of this project would imply.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-19T20:48:30-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-19T20:48:30-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/bill-c-22-can-be-corrected/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/bill-c-22-can-be-corrected/", "external_url": "https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/were-the-closest-weve-ever-been-to-fixing-this-outdated-law-carney-needs-to-get-us-closer/article_ba104198-cb3d-44e4-bcca-02665ec2ae3f.html", "title": "Bill C\u201322 Can Be Corrected", "content_html": "Justin Ling, the Star:
\n\n\n\n\nYet Bill C-22 doesn\u2019t mandate backdoors nor force companies to introduce any. It explicitly states the government cannot compel companies to introduce \u201csystemic vulnerability\u201d into their services. And it doesn\u2019t give cops or spies new authority to intercept Canadians\u2019 communications; it simply creates a process enlisting companies to help out with doing so.
\n \nOttawa is now scrambling to correct the record. Anandasangaree will reply to the Republicans, conveying \u201cthis legislation does not provide for indiscriminate access to devices or communications and does not require companies to weaken encryption and introduce so-called \u2018backdoors,\u2019\u201d according to a spokesperson. (The U.S. and the U.K., they also noted, already have these powers; Signal hasn\u2019t withdrawn from either country.)
\n \nSo the bill is not quite the nightmare some have made it out to be. But there are still some big issues.
\n
Whether Signal is crying wolf or simply believes the laws in those countries are strong enough to prevent mandated backdoors is a good question. In the U.K., for instance, Ofcom is not allowed to require a backdoor, but it is empowered to tell providers to weaken encryption for some without compromising the privacy of their platforms for all when \u201cfeasible technology\u201d exists to do so. On the one hand, that technology probably cannot exist; on the other hand, Signal is banking on a privacy-friendly interpretation of that law if it is ever tested.
\n\nApple, meanwhile, has not returned Advanced Data Protection to the U.K. despite the U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s claim that efforts to compromise its encryption have been withdrawn. This demand was made under a different law that, I suppose, Signal must not feel is immediately threatening.
\n\nBill C\u201322 does, as Ling writes, provide an exemption for instances where compliance with interception demands would “require the provider to introduce a systemic vulnerability related to that service or prevent the provider from rectifying such a vulnerability”. This is the same language as appeared in the Strong Borders Act proposed last year, though C\u201322 has new powers requiring the retention of metadata. It seems to me that a systemic vulnerability \u2014 one that “creates a substantial risk that secure information could be accessed by a person who does not have any right or authority to do so”, according to this bill \u2014 might not be found in something like metadata retention, which is what apparently concerns Signal.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-19T20:12:42-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-19T20:12:42-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/rich-guy-quote-journalism/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/rich-guy-quote-journalism/", "external_url": "https://stringinamaze.net/p/rich-guy-quote-journalism", "title": "Rich Guy Quote Journalism", "content_html": "\n\n\n\n\nThe answer is that there\u2019s an entire genre of media coverage best described as \u201crich guy has an opinion.\u201d It\u2019s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you\u2019ll see it everywhere: entire news stories dedicated to the otherwise unremarkable opinion of a rich person, or news stories that fold the opinions of rich people into their otherwise neutral coverage. It\u2019s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person\u2019s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness.
\n
Karl Bode has called this \u201cCEO Said a Thing! journalism\u201d, and it is all over the place. I think Shamshiri’s broader definition is useful, too, especially in lower-stakes situations.
\n\nThis week, for example, the Calgary Herald published a whole entire article dedicated to the complaints of a local landlord about a new protected bike lane. She is quoted as saying “[t]here will be no parking whatsoever for any of the businesses that are already here” below a photograph of her standing in front of the large parking lot, which will remain unchanged following the bike lane upgrades. The only other person apparently interviewed for the article is the area’s councillor. This is just one wealthy person’s grievances treated as inherently newsworthy.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-14T18:27:01-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-14T18:27:43-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/openai-perplexity-targeted-advertising/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/openai-perplexity-targeted-advertising/", "external_url": "https://www.techpolicy.press/as-companies-monetize-ai-courts-will-weigh-in/", "title": "Separate Lawsuits Claim OpenAI and Perplexity Are Sharing User Data With Third Parties for Targeted Advertising", "content_html": "Madeline Batt, Tech Policy Press:
\n\n\n\n\nThe recent lawsuit Noel v. Perplexity brought the question of AI monetization onto a courthouse docket. Since voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff, the details of the class action provided a window into how adtech in AI is likely to be challenged in the courts.
\n \nThe lawsuit targeted generative AI company Perplexity, along with Meta and Google, alleging they disclosed transcripts of users\u2019 conversations with chatbots for targeted advertising. [\u2026]
\n
It is not clear to me why the anonymous plaintiff gave up on this case. Abandoning the suit does not necessarily mean its claims are unfounded.
\n\nMaggie Harrison Dupr\u00e9, Futurism:
\n\n\n\n\nA new class action lawsuit accuses OpenAI of sharing data including user chat queries and personal identifying information like emails and user IDs with the tech giants \u2014 and targeted advertising behemoths \u2014 Meta and Google, without obtaining proper user consent.
\n
Interestingly, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada recently concluded an investigation of OpenAI’s training on personal information and whether it can produce that information reliably. It seems to me like questions about third-party ad targeting were out of scope. This is notable, however:
\n\n\n\n\nOpenAI represented that \u2018untraining\u2019 or \u2018reverse-training\u2019 LLMs, so that they no longer use or generate specific personal information for which a deletion request has been submitted, is not currently feasible. OpenAI explained that this is because its models are trained through repeated adjustments of billions of weights (parameters) over successive runs of training datasets and do not contain or store copies of information that they \u2018learned\u2019 from.
\n
I think we all knew this was the case, but it underscores the questionable effectiveness of robots.txt rules for website owners wishing to opt out of being a source for LLM training. It is not even clear OpenAI, for example, ensures data in its collection remains in compliance with opt-out requests when training new models.
Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail:
\n\n\n\n\nSecure messaging service Signal, which uses end-to-end encryption, is warning it would withdraw from Canada if asked to compromise its users\u2019 privacy under Bill C-22, Ottawa\u2019s proposed lawful access legislation.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nThe bill would require \u201ccore providers\u201d \u2014 which would later be defined through regulations \u2014 to retain metadata for up to a year.
\n
Are lawmakers capable of learning from their peers elsewhere? Do we have to do this kind of thing every year, country-by-country?
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-13T22:03:50-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-13T22:03:50-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/swimming-in-ai-murk/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/swimming-in-ai-murk/", "external_url": "https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/", "title": "We Are All Swimming in A.I. Murk", "content_html": "Jason Koebler, 404 Media:
\n\n\n\n\nTo browse the internet today, to consume any sort of content at all, is to be bombarded with AI of all sorts. People think things that are fake are real, things that are real are fake. Much has been written about \u201cAI psychosis,\u201d the nonspecific, nonscientific diagnosis given to people who have lost themselves to AI. Less has been said about the cognitive load of what other people\u2019s AI use is doing to the rest of us, and the insidious nature of having to navigate an internet and a world where lazy AI has infiltrated everything. Our brains are now performing untold numbers of calculations per day: Is this AI? Do I care if it\u2019s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?
\n
I imagine there are some people who do not much care if the news article they are reading or the music they are listening to was generated by A.I. \u2014 with or without their knowledge. I think it feels cheap and shameful. There are interesting uses for generating material based on known patterns and structures but we are stuck with a bunch of spam, and it makes everything feel inherently suspicious. Perhaps that is in some way a good thing; we should be more careful, in general. I think Koebler captures the feeling of being on constant high alert, and living in an increasingly artificial and scam-filled world.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-13T21:51:23-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-13T21:51:23-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/soapbox-indigo/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/soapbox-indigo/", "external_url": "https://aaron.vegh.ca/2026/05/lets-indigo", "title": "Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy Launch Indigo", "content_html": "Maybe you are in the market for a great Bluesky client. Maybe you are in the market for a great Mastodon client. Maybe you are in the market for a combination great Bluesky and Mastodon client.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nToday, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It\u2019s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!
\n
I have been using Indigo for a while as my primary iOS client for Bluesky and Mastodon, and I think it is terrific. I would happily use it as a standalone app for either. Mixing the two services in one app, though, is better than I had imagined. Everything feels right: posts are colour-coded, you can reply with either account, and there are clever ways of handling existing cross-posting.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIndigo will automatically detect when a post is duplicated across both networks. If the content is very similar and they both appear within a few minutes as each other, Indigo will merge them so you\u2019re not seeing them twice. You can toggle between each version as well as perform actions like quoting or replying to both posts simultaneously. We\u2019ve done a lot to make the experience of using two different services at once feel seamless.
\n
This kind of app might not work for everyone. I understand the arguments for treating these worlds entirely differently. For me, though, this is a little bit like how I prefer reading email newsletters in my RSS app: my brain is not differentiating between articles on a website and articles sent by email when I just want to read all the new articles. Likewise, I am rarely thinking I need to check Bluesky or I need to check Mastodon; I am usually just in the mood to scroll through or post on social media. Indigo scratches that itch.
\n\nThere is a caveat. Though Indigo supports multiple accounts of each type, only one of each can be active at a time. This makes sense and, I expect, would have no impact for most people. For those of us with accounts for different purposes, however, it does mean it is slightly more cumbersome than the way account switching typically works in a single-service client. This is, for me, a reasonable compromise.
\n\nOpen standards are pretty great, hey?
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-12T19:59:08-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-12T19:59:08-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/times-poilievre-fabricated-quote/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/times-poilievre-fabricated-quote/", "external_url": "https://bsky.app/profile/michellecyca.com/post/3mle5lc7lus2d", "title": "The New York Times Published an A.I.-Fabricated Quote Attributed to Pierre Poilievre", "content_html": "On 14 April, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the New York Times\u2019 Canada bureau chief, quoted Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, calling the spate of floor crossers \u201cturncoats\u201d. He apparently said this \u2014 and more \u2014 in a speech in March. This was printed on page A7 and sat for weeks on the web until 1 May when the Times corrected the paragraph by using actual quotes from Poilievre’s speech in April, not March.
\n\nThose earlier quotes? According to the editor’s note appended to the bottom, it was “an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation”.
\n\nThe Walrus\u2019 Michelle Cyca, on Bluesky [sic]:
\n\n\n\n\npersonally I think it’s a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com \u2014 certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country \u2014 asked an unspecified “AI tool” what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.
\n
Cyca is not kidding about the pay. The Times is currently hiring a Western Canada correspondent with a base pay of between $158,000 and $235,000 Canadian; the bureau chief is surely a pay grade above that. For comparison, the Globe and Mail is hiring an Ottawa bureau chief with a maximum posted salary of $146,000.
\n\nHow much more would the Times need to pay a reporter to verify the quotations they use in an article? Could the Times afford an editor to double-check these things? I was at an event this evening about A.I. and art, and one of the panelists \u2014 a university professor \u2014 said that he assumes that A.I. is now omnipresent and acts accordingly. Why is one of the most prestigious English-language newspapers not doing the same for its reporters, regardless of its policies?
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-11T22:29:29-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-11T22:29:52-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/venmo-friends-by-default/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/venmo-friends-by-default/", "external_url": "https://www.theverge.com/tech/927503/venmo-app-redesign-privacy-posts", "title": "In a Privacy Improvement, Venmo Transactions Will Be Visible to Friends by Default", "content_html": "Jay Peters, the Verge:
\n\n\n\n\nVenmo is starting to test a big redesign of its app, and as part of the changes, it will be implementing a major new privacy measure: the onboarding process for new users will set their posts to only be viewable by their friends by default instead of being public.
\n
I remain too dumb to understand why you would want financial transactions to be visible to anyone but yourself.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-11T09:51:26-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-11T09:51:51-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/zitron-not-skeptical/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/zitron-not-skeptical/", "external_url": "https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot", "title": "Ed Zitron Is Not an A.I. Skeptic", "content_html": "Kelsey Piper, the Argument:
\n\n\n\n\nAt some point, pretending that how people use AI is a complete mystery is just lying to your audience. And at some point, [Ed] Zitron\u2019s \u201clayers of skepticism\u201d attitude \u2014 where he is skeptical that AI is a thing at all, that it has any uses, that those uses provide any economic value, that the revenue numbers are real, that adoption is a fad, that training costs are a meaningful R&D expense, that the capital build-out is going to happen at all, that the market could sustain the capital build-out if it happened \u2014 leaves one buried in too many impossibility assertions to actually sort them by plausibility.
\n \nIt is radical skepticism, ultimately arriving at \u201cperhaps nothing we see is real,\u201d rather than principled skepticism about the relatively weakest links in the companies\u2019 case for investment.
\n
My main problem with this piece is that it acknowledge Zitron’s own framing as an A.I. skeptic when he is not one. A skeptic is someone who asks good-faith questions and uses the answers to build an evidence-based view of something. They can separate reasoning from a narrative, while understanding the role it plays. For example, I do not regularly read the Argument because I think it a pretty mediocre website with an Atlantic-lite viewpoint, but that does not mean this article is itself poor or making an unfair case. I think Piper’s frustration with Zitron is entirely earned. However, it is a mistake to think of any of this in terms of skepticism when Zitron’s understanding is, especially now, much closer to conspiracy thinking.
\n\nEach of Zitron’s articles is an impenetrable wall of text often reaching into the tens of thousands of words. This volume of material feels substantial \u2014 it can be substantial \u2014 to the extent Zitron explicitly markets his newsletter on the basis of its word count. Weird.1 He explores basically two major themes: A.I.’s economic case, and its usefulness. Zitron is zealously opposed to the possibility of either in real terms; while he will occasionally gesture at people or businesses doing something with A.I., his default position is more-or-less that it has little use.
\n\nThere are real criticisms of what generative A.I. does: problems with its output, like its repetition of stereotypes or bugs in code. There are criticisms for what it does to our world, like its energy and water consumption, and what it does to society, like how easy it is to generate junk articles and videos. The societal pushback is also notable, and its unethical foundations continue to be a ripe source of pain. But, as Piper writes in the second footnote, Zitron’s articles are “a superficiality of analysis” despite the voluminous output. Like a lot of conspiracy thinking, they are rooted in fact but have a stricter adherence to supporting an existing narrative.
\n\nWhile I am writing about adequate skepticism, I am unsure of the apparent attention span crisis. We seem to be constantly circulating multi-thousand-word essays, barely-edited podcast episodes, and hours-long YouTube videos. People spend real time with media — a long time. Sometimes, a generous runtime is what it takes to make an argument; often, though, I think it becomes a filter for separating the committed from the not. And, then again, maybe extra-long takes the bubble I am in. ↥︎
\nSlow news week? Sure.
\n\nHere is a fun Bluesky thread from Annie Rauwerda \u2014 who runs Depths of Wikipedia \u2014 with different domains before they belonged to notable brands. Like, before Claude.com was an Anthropic thing, it used to belong to a Boston-area computer consultant. Stuff like that.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-08T23:02:01-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-08T23:02:01-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/sponsor/magic-lasso-adblock-may-08/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/sponsor/magic-lasso-adblock-may-08/", "external_url": "https://www.magiclasso.co/", "title": "Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Block Ads in iPhone, iPad, and Mac Apps", "content_html": "Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV \u2014 not just in Safari?
\n\nThen download Magic Lasso Adblock \u2013 the ad blocker designed for you.
\n\n![\"Sponsor:](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2026/2026-03-magic-lasso-overview.png\")
The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:
\n\nNews apps
Social media
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All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.
\n\nWith over 5,000 five star reviews, it\u2019s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
\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 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-08T12:00:38-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-03-29T21:29:16-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/canadian-doe-dhs-lawsuit/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/canadian-doe-dhs-lawsuit/", "external_url": "https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-dhs-aclu-lawsuit-canadian-john-doe-9.7187851", "title": "Canadian Alleges Legal Intimidation by U.S. Homeland Security Over Social Media Posts", "content_html": "Chris Iorfida, CBC News:
\n\n\n\n\nA Canadian is fighting back in U.S. federal court over what he says is an attempt by the Department of Homeland Security, through Google, to seek “vast swaths of information” about his personal life following social media posts critical of Donald Trump’s administration.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nOn Jan. 30, the Canadian X user disparaged ICE in a post that received nearly 96,000 views, according to this week’s complaint.
\n \n[\u2026]
\n \nThe complaint at hand, however, states that John Doe was not seeking entry to the U.S. and has not done so since 2015.
\n
The only details we have of this case are as alleged in the complaint (PDF) and the partially redacted summons (PDF), and they are incomplete. The tweet in question is not quoted, the account is not named, and, though there are enough clues that I tried to track it down, X’s search feature sucks, so I have no idea what it said. Perhaps there is another reason the Department of Homeland Security is trying to obtain details of the Gmail account; perhaps, too, the government was not aware it was targeting a Canadian. (Though, if it were targeting a U.S. resident for their speech, is that any better? Probably not!)
\n\nOne thing that remains unclear is how the government obtained this email address. Iorfida writes of a previous case:
\n\n\n\n\nIn the first Trump administration, CBP issued a summons to Twitter in 2017 requesting information regarding the account of a user on Twitter, which the company objected to.
\n
It would be unsurprising if X was entirely compliant with the government’s request.
\n\nWhat is shocking to me is that the U.S. government is apparently going after someone whose X posts, according to the complaint, “have received tens of thousands of views or more; collectively, his posts have received well over 100,000 views”, and this single tweet might represent around half that total. I do not intend to be mean, but those are not the numbers of a notable X account. Officials in the most powerful country in the world are apparently going after some random Canadian for an unmemorable and basically unpopular tweet.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-07T16:29:54-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-07T16:29:54-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/reddit-website-block/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/reddit-website-block/", "external_url": "https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/why-reddit-blocked-my-daily-visit-to-its-mobile-website/", "title": "Reddit Joins Other Social Media Platforms in Worsening Its Website and Pushing Visitors to Apps", "content_html": "Nate Anderson, Ars Technica:
\n\n\n\n\nThe block seemed curious, given that Reddit began as a website, and websites generally want traffic. Few are in the practice of turning traffic away.
\n \nBut some services, including X and Instagram, aggressively push users toward apps\u2014or at least toward being logged in to them.
\n \nI reached out to the company to ask what was going on. According to a spokesperson, \u201cWe recently started running a test for a small subset of frequent logged-out mobile users that prompts them to download the app after visiting the site. These users are already familiar with Reddit and we\u2019ve seen that the experience is much better for them in the app. The app offers a more personalized experience and users can more easily find communities that match their interests.\u201d
\n
Like other major social media platforms, this turns Reddit into a walled garden. Presumably, this is in part of the company’s aggressive strategy to license users’ posts for A.I. training, plus encouraging user growth. It sucks that the open web is getting torn apart because commercial websites are incentivized to direct people to apps where large-scale scraping is a bigger challenge. This whole thing used to feel so quaint.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-06T22:41:31-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-06T22:41:31-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } }, { "id": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/uk-age-verification-web/", "url": "https://pxlnv.com/linklog/uk-age-verification-web/", "external_url": "https://www.404media.co/uk-iphone-ipad-ios-users-porn-age-verification/", "title": "U.K. Age Verification on iOS 26.4 Appears to Be Passed to Websites, Not Just Apps", "content_html": "Samantha Cole, 404 Media:
\n\n\n\n\nAylo, the parent company of Pornhub and other major porn sites, announced today that in the UK, iPhone and iPad users will be able to access its sites again, ending an over three month ban that Aylo initially enacted because of the region\u2019s age verification law.
\n \nAs of Tuesday, following the iOS 26.4 rollout in the UK, users on the new operating system can visit Pornhub and Aylo\u2019s other sites from their iPhones.
\n
Frustratingly, there is no explanation as to how Aylo’s websites are getting information from this iOS 26.4 API, the documentation for which is only for native apps. I may have missed something obvious, but the only mention I could find of this capability is in a February AppleInsider article. Also I could not find a way to trigger this verification step, even after changing my iPhone’s region, so I cannot test whether it is being passed through an HTTP header \u2014 which I presume it is \u2014 or another method.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-05-05T22:02:57-06:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-05T22:02:57-06:00", "author": { "name": "Nick Heer" } } ] }![this shape](\"https://pxlnv.com/extras/2026/2026-04-meet-me-metaverse-pyramid.jpg\"){kind=link}