Link Log

Writing Tools Updates in MacOS Tahoe ⇥ developer.apple.com

I have been skimming through many of the WWDC videos from this year, and the one on Writing Tools updates caught my attention. You may remember I was frustrated by the current version’s brittle presentation, and the inability to see what changes had been made by Proofread and Rewrite.

Now, it seems from this video that improvements have been made — see the demos at 8:21, 11:09, and 15:27. It still does not seem to show the difference after using Rewrite as changes are made in-place, but at least it is no longer using a popover. I will likely have more to say after I test this, something which I do not plan on doing until MacOS is closer to a release version.

Shy U.I. ⇥ mastodon.social

Tuomas Hämäläinen:

Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.

It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.

I am still getting my bearings on even a first impression of Liquid Glass — for reasons good and bad — but this design goal continues to irk me.

In part, that is because the word “content” makes a little vomit come up in my mouth. Also, this does not seem like a worthwhile goal for human interface design in most applications. The kinds of devices Apple makes are largely interactive. It makes sense for a television set to get out of the way — what you want to see is a movie or a show, not the bezel, the manufacturer’s logo, or anything else. Regardless of whether you are using your iPhone or your Mac, you are probably doing something with what you are seeing. Even if you are semi-passively scrolling social media, you might tap on a profile or share a post. What you can do with what you are seeing onscreen should be evident; it should not recede to the point where it is unclear what is interactive.

The visual language Apple introduced to the Mac, in particular, with Big Sur was a significant regression in this area. I need to spend more time with Liquid Glass, but at least it is more clear that the monochrome icons in toolbars are actually clickable buttons, so that is a plus.

Live Activities in iPadOS 26 Seem Like a Preview of the All-Screen iPhone ⇥ pxlnv.com

After the Information reported last month that a truly all-screen iPhone would be arriving next year, I wondered how Apple would handle Dynamic Island stuff without the excuse of a camera cutout. I, for some reason, assumed this stuff would just go away.

I probably overthought this greatly. Take a look at how background tasks are handled in iPadOS 26. They are Live Activities spawned from the Dynamic Island when available, but not dependent on the Dynamic Island. While that software convention emerged from a hardware compromise, it might continue to exist even if the hardware has been updated.

Admittedly, Apple has only shown this for background tasks; it has not enabled full Dynamic Island-style functionality on iPads. But it seems entirely possible the fruits of the island will live on.

Apple’s Spin on A.I. and iPadOS Multitasking ⇥ mjtsai.com

Michael Tsai has a good roundup of commentary about Apple’s post-WWDC media spin, adding:

I’ll just repeat that I have almost no interest in the next-generation Siri features. I just want Apple to make the basic stuff — announced back when Steve Jobs was still alive — fast and reliable. Apple never seems to talk about this, and nobody asks them.

I would also like to know if the revised Siri architecture will be able to handle common basic tasks, or if that will take yet another fifteen years and a couple redesigns. It will be extremely funny if I can soon ask Siri when my mom’s flight arrives and it is able to find the information buried in some email or iMessage, but it still unable to stop the only active timer.

The United States Keeps Hitting Snooze on the Emergency TikTok Ban ⇥ techdirt.com

Alex Leary, Wall Street Journal:

President Trump is planning to give TikTok another lifeline.

With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.

It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.

One way to view this is as an indictment of the supposed urgency of this law. Another is through the lens of this increasingly lawless administration.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.

I know most every country has flexible interpretations of law enforcement, and this all occurs on a scale. I know this has been the case for past U.S. presidents; I, too, have read Chomsky. But the actions of this administration are sliding further on that scale toward a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Kicking the can down the road on the divest-or-ban requirements of this law is just as much a part of that story as the rest of the hostile domestic and foreign acts so far undertaken by this president.

The Long Road to the iPad’s ‘Mac-Like Multitasking’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Andrew Cunningham, of Ars Technica, also got to interview Craig Federighi, though he focused on the iPad multitasking announcements instead of Siri delays:

“We decided this time: make everything we can make available,” said Federighi, “even if it has some nuances on older hardware, because we saw so much demand [for Stage Manager].”

That slight change in approach, combined with other behind-the-scenes optimizations, makes the new multitasking model more widely compatible than Stage Manager is. There are still limits on those devices—not to the number of windows you can open, but to how many of those windows can be active and up-to-date at once. And true multi-monitor support would remain the purview of the faster, more-expensive models.

“We have discovered many, many optimizations,” Federighi said. “We re-architected our windowing system and we re-architected the way that we manage background tasks, background processing, that enabled us to squeeze more out of other devices than we were able to do at the time we introduced Stage Manager.”

Among my many frustrations with iPadOS is how, since its debut, it has aggressively kicked backgrounded apps out of memory, particularly older Safari tabs. This is because it only barely has virtual memory, and only then for specific tasks on some hardware.

Even if there is no real swapping in iPadOS 26, I hope this indicates tabs can linger for longer in the background. The ability to juggle multiple tasks without requiring reloading information is a bare minimum requirement for “Mac-like multitasking” in my view. I look forward to finding out from reviewers if this has been accomplished.

Apple Insists It Had a Working Version of Personalized Siri Features Last Year ⇥ techradar.com

Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak found time to chat with a few journalists and media personalities this week. Both sat down for video interviews with Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal and Mark Spoonauer and Lance Ulanoff from Future U.S. publications, while Federighi alone spoke with Justine Ezarik.

Ulanoff, of TechRadar, quoting Federighi:

“We found that when we were developing this feature that we had, really, two phases, two versions of the ultimate architecture that we were going to create,” he explained. “Version one we had working here at the time that we were getting close to the conference, and had, at the time, high confidence that we could deliver it. We thought by December, and if not, we figured by spring, until we announced it as part of WWDC. Because we knew the world wanted a really complete picture of, ‘What’s Apple thinking about the implications of Apple intelligence and where is it going?'”

As Apple was working on a V1 of the Siri architecture, it was also working on what Federighi called V2, “a deeper end-to-end architecture that we knew was ultimately what we wanted to create, to get to a full set of capabilities that we wanted for Siri.”

Federighi insisted Apple had a functioning, working version of the “V1” architecture that really could do the complex things it showed in its feature presentation at WWDC last year, but it apparently did not work well enough. Federighi said they have the “V2” version working today, too — but was not interested in providing a demo of either version, nor commit to a date more specific than “2026”. This is a message it was careful to reinforce in other interviews.

I can understand why Apple would want to dispel the idea that it never had a truly functional version of this software. Joswiak, speaking to Stern, said “there’s this narrative out there that … it was demoware only. No […]”. From a user’s perspective, however, this is a distinction without a difference, relying almost entirely on the fuzzy boundary between software that works only for the purpose of a single filmed demo, and software that works so poorly as to effectively be the same. But putting this on the record will be important as Apple prepares to defend itself over allegations of false advertising. That is, I think, who this statement is for — not for me, you, the public at large — but for itself and, by extension, its shareholders.

A.I. Slop Squatters ⇥ 404media.co

Samantha Cole, 404 Media:

On the vaccines.gov domain, topics for spam blogs include “Gay Impregnation,” “Gay Firry[sic] Porn,” and “Planes in Top Gun.”

The same AI spam farm operation has also targeted the American Council on Education’s site, Stanford, NPR, and a subdomain of vaccines.gov. Each of the sites have slightly different names — on Stanford’s site it’s called “AceNet Hub”; on NPR.org “Form Generation Hub” took over a domain that seems to be abandoned by the station’s “Generation Listen” project from 2014. On the vaccines.gov site it’s “Seymore Insights.” All of these sites are in varying states of useability. They all contain spam articles with the byline “Ashley,” with the same black and white headshot.

Andy Baio:

Several people have asked how this happened, and I’m not 100% sure! Almost every subdomain points to different EC2 IP addresses in AWS’s us-west-1 and us-west-2 regions, and each one hosts a WordPress installation with different content, but the same author and similar templates. Here’s my list. https://docs.google.com/…

I found a bunch of affected sites not on Baio’s list by searching the web for “term of use” “ashley” “minutes read”. Western Digital got hit hard. On one, I found a link back to a GitHub account by the name of pgpump containing some interesting and relevant repos. The key word “arsae” also turned up a few similar-looking scripts in other users’ repos, and a PHP script by the same name. I am not the right person to try to figure this out, but whoever is behind this appears to be continuing as their most recent commits happened last week.

Update: “Marshall Banana” in the 404 article comments points to a likely reason for the varied and high-profile spam hosting: dangling DNS entries.

Kudos to Jon Prosser ⇥ youtube.com

I am not sure what the exchange rate is for Being Right Points to dollars, but I think Jon Prosser should be able to exchange his for a new hoodie, at least.

In January, Prosser showed a preview of the new Camera app, and suggested it was representative of broader iOS changes. That was followed up with a more comprehensive video in March, a couple of weeks after Mark Gurman reported system redesigns were in the works across the board. After Prosser’s video, Gurman tweeted the mockups were not “representative of what we’ll see at WWDC”.

So Prosser responded with a lot more details — the vast majority of which have proved correct. Toggles are indeed pill-shaped; there are glassy accents on icons, the Dock, and on Notification Centre controls, all of which respond to the phone’s physical orientation; there are plenty of fluid animations that feel similar to the Dynamic Island.

Prosser’s one big whiff was in his prediction of much more rounded icons on the home screen — not quite circular, but dramatically more curved than those seen in previous iOS versions. While the corner radius does appear to my eyes to be a little greater than it was in iOS 18, it is not to the extent Prosser’s Front Page Tech channel mocked up.

Anyway, if you are keeping score, Gurman gets a few points for saying there would be significant changes across all of Apple’s operating systems, and that it would pitch this as a play for consistency. But Prosser was the one who accurately showed iOS 26’s visual updates, and gets the glory.

Apple Updated Its Human Interface Guidelines for Liquid Glass ⇥ developer.apple.com

Apple:

Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world. Its colour is informed by surrounding content and intelligently adapts between light and dark environments. Born out of a close collaboration between the design and engineering teams, Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and dynamically reacts to movement with specular highlights. This creates a lively experience that makes using iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV even more delightful.

There is guidance on using Liquid Glass in the Materials section of the updated Human Interface Guidelines, and information for designers and developers deeper in its updated documentation. Of note:

App icons take on a design that’s dynamic and expressive. Updates to the icon grid result in a standardized iconography that’s visually consistent across devices and concentric with hardware and other elements across the system. App icons now contain layers, which dynamically respond to lighting and other visual effects the system provides. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all now offer default (light), dark, clear, and tinted appearance variants, empowering people to personalize the look and feel of their Home Screen.

Designers or developers can create these layered icons with a new app called Icon Composer.

Like every year, I have been a big dummy and have installed the iOS beta on day one on my only iPhone. This is a very stupid thing to do. But try to stop me from playing around with Notification Centre’s Liquid Glass sheet. It is tremendous fun — truly the kind of thing that is difficult to replicate or appreciate without using it directly.

Whether it fixes my biggest bugbear is an different question.

The Analysis Group Won an Industry Award in 2022 for Its ‘Sham’ App Store Report ⇥ prnewswire.com

Speaking of the Analysis Group, here is a press release from 2022:

Analysis Group was acknowledged at the GCR [Global Competition Review] awards ceremony for its work on Epic Games v. Apple, which was awarded “Matter of the Year” and “Litigation of the Year – non-cartel defence.” The litigation involved allegations that anti-steering provisions contained in Apple’s App Store policies for developers stifled competition.

And here is an article by Tripp Mickle, New York Times, from last month:

Judge Gonzalez Rogers questioned whether Apple was telling the truth and asked the company to provide documents about its plans. It produced 89,000 documents but claimed a third of them were confidential. The court said those claims were “unsubstantiated” and forced Apple to turn over more than half of the documents.

The documents made clear that Mr. Roman had lied under oath, that the Analysis Group report was a “sham” and that Apple had “willfully” disregarded a court order, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said. She called it a “cover-up.”

I wonder if the Analysis Group is giving back that award. I also wonder if that matters in the eyes of industry groups like the Global Competition Review.

Apple Publishes Its Latest Analysis Group App Store Report ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Apple:

Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2024, according to a new study by economists Professor Andrey Fradkin from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Dr. Jessica Burley from Analysis Group. For more than 90 percent of the billings and sales facilitated by the App Store ecosystem, developers did not pay any commission to Apple.

The purpose of this study — also produced in 2020, 2021, and 2023, though not last year — is two-fold. First, it indicates to lawmakers the footprint of the App Store and suggests any further regulatory action would seriously compromise the economy as a whole. The second reason it exists is to soften the impression of Apple’s commission on digital purchases, hence this part of the study and press release, emphasis mine:

The new study by Professor Fradkin and Dr. Burley highlights how developers on the App Store have more ways than ever to monetize their apps. The study found that in 2024, developer billings and sales for digital goods and services totalled $131 billion, driven by games, photo and video editing apps, and enterprise tools. Sales of physical goods and services exceeded $1 trillion, fuelled by rising demand for online food delivery and pickup, as well as grocery orders. In-app advertising revenue from ads placed by developers in their apps was $150 billion.

A big amount, but measured against the total estimated economy of $1.3 trillion, it is supposed to be seen as a small fraction — “less than 10%”. This number is, the study’s authors write, not an estimate of payments made through In-App Purchases:

Sales from digital goods and services purchased elsewhere but used on apps on Apple devices are included, while billings from in-app purchases made via the App Store but used elsewhere are excluded.

I do not understand why this definition was chosen. Surely the excluded sales are actually a better example of transactions “facilitated by the App Store ecosystem”, even if the purchase is ultimately consumed elsewhere. But, then again, I cannot think of many things I can buy with In-App Purchases which I ultimately use outside the app, so perhaps it does not make much difference if they had been included. It may be the result of a methodological gap in the study.

The study’s authors still conclude Apple takes a commission on “less than 10%” of $1.295 trillion. If this number was closer to 1%, the report would probably say that. It is perhaps a touch unfair, but let us assume it is about 10%, which happens to be just shy of the $131 in total digital billings. Apple’s commission is not as straightforward as the flat 30% rate it used to charge. But, at its minimum 15% rate, this suggests Apple made at least $19.4 billion in 2024 in App Store commissions alone — from what the Analysis Group says is less than 10% of an economic ecosystem facilitated by the App Store.

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve always been baffled about why a small minority of developers, including small indie developers like me, are required to finance the App Store ecosystem for every developer, including the developers of “free” apps that nonetheless generate billions of dollars per year from billings and sales. Why is Apple’s IAP not required for all purchases in all App Store apps? It’s difficult for me to see a principled distinction between the apps that have to use Apple IAP and the apps that don’t. It seems completely arbitrary. Apple made a big deal about Spotify not making “contributions to that marketplace,” yet Apple also openly (and hypocritically) admits that most of the financial transactions that occur in App Store apps are not contributing to that marketplace either. There are a lot of “free riders” in the App Store.

The thing about the Analysis Group’s report is that it is very broad. While it does not include transactions made through Safari on iOS, things like shopping in Amazon’s app or buying airfare in Kayak’s app are factored in. Whether these purchases were actually facilitated by the App Store ecosystem is questionable to me — would someone have not bought that flight if not for their iPhone?

Where this gets especially murky is with the whole economic world that is dependent on smartphones. The classic example of this is Uber. Taxis have existed for a long time, and so have pirate taxis, and you could always ask your friend to carpool, and you can take a bus. But the structure of Uber, which relies on an app each for customers and drivers, would not exist without the App Store. Yet Uber is not required to use In-App Purchases, nor does Apple collect any commission on its business. A similar argument could be made about social apps like Instagram and TikTok, which are also smartphone-dependent, yet are funded by ads Apple does not get a cut of — mostly.

Apple has argued in court this commission is for App Store upkeep, developer relations, API development, and for intellectual property licensing. These are things common to all apps. Yet only those facilitating transactions for digital services are expected to pay? How is Uber — with its half-gigabyte client app updated once or twice weekly for tens of millions of users — not paying for App Store hosting and bandwidth, but indie developers are?

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The Sad Story of the Long-Promised 3 GHz Power Mac G5 ⇥ 512pixels.net

With just a few days to go until WWDC, Stephen Hackett chronicled the history of the mythical 3 GHz Power Mac G5, previewed at the conference over twenty years ago:

The heat generated by the G5 would become an issue later on, but first we need to talk about Steve Jobs broke a fundamental rule of Apple:

We don’t comment on future products.

The Power Mac G5 was before my time as a Mac user, but I remember the otherworldly impression it made on me. I am no Mac historian, but it still feels to me like it began a distinct era of flagship Macs that were both powerful and relatively accessible — the inflation-adjusted price of the best G5 spec, without build-to-order upgrades, is nearly $2,000 less than the base price of today’s Mac Pro.

Microsoft Redesigns Office Portal to Prioritize Copilot ⇥ reddit.com

I, like millions of people, spend a good chunk of my Mondays through Fridays in Microsoft 365 (formerly Office) applications, many of which I partly or wholly access through a browser. For years, I could just type portal.office.com in my browser and get links to Word, Excel, Outlook — all the classics — plus some organization-specific applications.

Microsoft being Microsoft, it has decided to bury all that. We are in the artificial intelligence era now, baby. Instead of seeing the applications millions of people rely on, Microsoft has decided the default view should be a Copilot chat. The familiar suite of apps is in another page accessible from the sidebar; each app can, at least, be pinned to that same sidebar. This was barely announced and seems to have taken many by surprise.

But, hey, Copilot should at least make me more productive, right? It is Microsoft’s own service — albeit backed by OpenAI’s work — and integrated, in theory, with our organization’s applications and files. Maybe it could function as an application launcher. So I told Copilot to “launch Word”. Copilot:

I can’t directly launch Microsoft Word from here, but I can help you open it on your device. Here’s how you can do it:

On Windows:

  1. Press the Windows key on your keyboard or click the Start menu.

  2. Type “Word” in the search bar.

  3. Click on Microsoft Word from the search results.

On macOS:

  1. Open Finder or press Command + Space to open Spotlight Search.

  2. Type “Word” and press Enter when Microsoft Word appears.

Truly embarrassing stuff to interrupt users’ learned workflow for something worse because it is important for Microsoft to be seen as a cutting-edge innovator. It has made Copilot part of its branding — so much so that it will advertise Copilot even where it is not available, for “consistency”.

Texas Will Soon Be the Ninth State to Pass a Popular ‘Right to Repair’ Law ⇥ techdirt.com

Richard Lawler, the Verge:

Texas moved closer to becoming the next state with a right to repair law on the books, as the state Senate unanimously voted 31 – 0 to finalize HB 2963 this weekend. It would require manufacturers to make spare parts, manuals, and necessary tools available for equipment sold or used in the country’s second most populated state.

Maddie Stone, Grist:

That [if Ohio’s bill becomes law] would mark an important political inflection point for the right-to-repair movement. While most of the states that have passed repair laws so far are Democratic strongholds, bills have been introduced in all 50 as of February. The adoption of a right-to-repair law in deep red Ohio — where Republicans control the state House, Senate, and the governor’s office, and Donald Trump won the last presidential election by more than 10 percentage points — would further underscore the broad, bipartisan popularity of being allowed to fix the stuff you own.

Karl Bode, TechDirt:

This is definite progress, and I hate to be a buzzkill, but it’s worth reiterating that of the 8 states that have passed right to repair reforms so far, not a single one has actually enforced them in any meaningful way. This despite no shortage of bad corporate actors working overtime to kill independent repair shops, make manuals and parts hard to find, use obnoxious DRM, or claim that repairing your own stuff violates warranty.

The problem with corporations insisting upon the safety and reliability that only comes from staying within their own ecosystem of parts and accessories is that they are frequently lying or, at least, exaggerating about the dangers. At least lawmakers across the political spectrum and around the world are beginning to call them on their tall tales.

Canadian Liberal Party Border Bill Also Includes Warrantless Access Provisions ⇥ michaelgeist.ca

Michael Geist:

The government yesterday introduced the Strong Border Act (Bill C-2), legislation that was promoted as establishing new border measure provisions presumably designed to address U.S. concerns regarding the border. Yet buried toward the end of the bill are lawful access provisions that have nothing to do with the border. Those provisions, which raise the prospect of warrantless access to information about Internet subscribers, establish new global production orders of subscriber information, and envision new levels of access to data held by electronic service providers, mark the latest attempt in a longstanding campaign by Canadian law enforcement for lawful access legislation. Stymied by the Supreme Court of Canada (which has ruled that there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber data) and by repeated failures to present a compelling evidentiary case for warrantless access, law enforcement has instead tried to frame lawful access as essential to address everything from organized crime to cyber-bullying to (now) border safety. […]

As has become frustratingly typical for laws of this type, there are secrecy requirements and warrant workarounds based on urgency. But it is tucked into an unrelated bill that only exists because of provocations from our southern neighbour. This is a completely dishonest runaround to legislate long-desired capabilities.

Update: Jeremy Appel, the Orchard:

I have a Liberal campaign flyer pinned to my office wall, where I place election campaign literature I accumulate from various elections, which reads: Making life more affordable, protecting your rights and standing up to Trump.

This legislation doesn’t do any of these things, and in fact does the opposite of two of the three.

Profound weakness masquerading as strength and confidence.

The Who Cares Era ⇥ dansinker.com

Dan Sinker:

Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that’s designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif’s case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees’ seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there’s no way it would have happened.

He’s right. Nobody’s funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares.

(It’s worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.)

This does not seem like it is a brand new feeling. It is plausible that one could create a Paul Fairie-esque collection of similar complaints throughout history — of art created only for commerce’s sake; of shallow media intended for brief consumption instead of a lasting impression.

I think it is more useful to de-emphasize the “era” part of Sinker’s criticism, and to instead consider how carelessness creeps in. Sarah Wynn-Williams published “Careless People” earlier this year. I wrote in April about Perplexity’s carelessness of ethics and privacy. Perhaps both of these examples are better described as corrosion or corruption. What Sinker is describing is more like cultural and societal ennui.

Les Orchard:

The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization — metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.

There have always been measures for success, but the ability to relentlessly optimize for them is a fairly new phenomenon. Plenty of films and plays are created by reverse-engineering the tropes favoured by award committees, but they still need to be good in order to draw an audience.

Update: A lack of care is, in part, downstream of other forces (previously linked).

How the V60 Became the Coffee Brewer of Choice for Many ⇥ youtube.com

I am a daily user of a V60, so this new James Hoffmann video scratched an itch I did not know I had. Not to spoil it, but the V60 does not make a significant appearance until the last four minutes, but the journey is worth the wait.

The discussion of the mid-2000s specialty coffee movement in Canada brought back some memories, too. Vancouver was the most significant place in the country and perhaps one of a few places in the world where this attitude toward coffee was taking over, and Calgary luckily received some of the reflected glory. There are shots of menus from 2006 with by-the-cup brewing for two or three dollars, around the same time Phil & Sebastian was getting started here. There is a note at the bottom of one of the menus from Elysian advertising advance purchases of a forthcoming award-winning coffee at the then-devastating price of ten dollars per cup.

Turns out twenty years is a long time.

Meta and Yandex Apps on Android Have Been Tracking Users in Newly Creepy Ways ⇥ localmess.github.io

Aniketh Girish, et al.:

We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps — including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser — silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

The covert tracking — implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers — allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site.

The difference between targeted advertising and spyware is there is no difference.

After Girish, et al., disclosed this behaviour, Meta’s apps ceased tracking users with this method, and Goodin said Yandex will also stop. Meta is still under a consent decree struck in 2019 with a $5 billion penalty after violating a 2012 agreement. Executives at Meta do not care about privacy, rules, laws, or common sense. They will keep doing stuff like this. Ad tech is an indefensible industry run by megalomaniacs who would better serve society if they were made to live in a cave under an ice sheet, though I do not care which one.