Link Log

About Those Property Taxes ⇥ thenarwhal.ca

There are some curious subplots in the data centre boom happening now in Alberta that I think go a long way toward explaining why people hate these things. First, even though developers tout their clean electricity bonafides, the fact is the actual power will come from fossil fuels. That is in part because our province requires it. It turns out that our government appears to be using this wave of new projects as one reason to grow our robust oil-and-gas industry.

Drew Anderson, the Narwhal:

A leaked document, labelled a cabinet report and outlining possible plans to overhaul Alberta’s natural gas pipeline system to spur AI data centre construction, caused an uproar last week.

[…]

The plans for natural gas expansion are not just about data centres, there is also reference to expanding oil and gas production, including access to natural gas for oilsands operations.

But the expansion of AI data centres are front and centre throughout the document, which notes “the Government of Alberta is actively courting hyperscale data centre capital and other investors.”

Former UCP staffer Mackenzie Blyth noted in the Alberta Counsel News that polling showed just “13 per cent of Albertans surveyed would support a nearby data centre, compared with 71 per cent who would oppose one”. These data centres are promoted as an economic boon in their own right and the knock-on effects of burning a whole bunch of stuff we dig out of the ground is what money sounds like around here. Even so, opposition to these projects cuts across political lines.

Meta’s gigawatt centre is among the largest of the new projects and surely the highest-profile one — well, of the proposals I think will actually exist. But aside from what has been released through official channels, not much is known about it yet.

Howard Chai, the Realist, dug up the relevant property records:

As is commonplace now with data centre developments, there is little transparency on even simple details such as the address and ownership structure — by the owner, developer, and even the government. All that has been stated in the public announcements is that the data centre will be located somewhere north of Edmonton.

According to Data Center Map, however, the location is 56111 Range Road 223. Using that address, The Realist was then able to identify the exact legal parcels that make up the site and confirmed details of the land sale with transaction info shared with The Realist by Alberta-based commercial real estate data firm The Network.

These parcels were sold in February for just over $300 million to a shell company.

Data centres are not inherently evil. But the companies developing them seem surprised by public criticism even as they have been less than honest about their effect on the environment, have hidden behind shell companies, and have goaded local politicians into doing their bidding. I keep thinking about an exchange I quoted comparing public contempt for fracking to the reception of data centres:

Whether Sharp realizes it or not, the fracking public relations playbook is exactly what people like asset manager Dan Clifton argues data centre developers and A.I. companies ought to be pulling from. Josh Brown, the host and another finance guy, says this was a relatively easy argument for the fracking industry to make because “the answer is obvious: two-dollar natural gas”. Clifton responds by admitting that “one of the problems [with data centres] is they don’t create a lot of jobs. There’s not a lot of construction jobs, and there’s definitely not jobs inside the data centre itself. So you’ve got to make it about property taxes”. Even these boosters recognize the favourable arguments are pretty limited. “You know what would be a good argument?”, Brown asks, “hey, it’s this or a nuclear power plant”.

About those property taxes…

It turns out that if you do a little searching for key phrases like Meta and, perhaps, data centre and, say, property taxes, you find some fascinating things. Like this article from Andy Larsen, reporting for the Salt Lake Tribune:

Eagle Mountain has given data center development tax breaks in the form of property tax relief through the city’s Redevelopment Agency four times. All are through Sweetwater Industrial Park Community Reinvestment Areas, on the south end of the city’s boundaries.

That means that when this new data center development is taxed, rather than those funds going into the city coffers like usual, most or all of that money goes back to the Redevelopment Agency and, to some extent, the companies creating the data centers.

Two of the four data centres are Meta’s. Instead of a huge property tax windfall for Eagle Mountain, it is foregoing $2.5 million annually and raising residents’ taxes to try to make up the difference.

What about Meta’s giant Hyperion project in Louisiana? Roshan Abraham, Wired:

The state’s agreement with Meta makes clear that as public land, the property Meta is leasing is exempt from traditional taxes. It creates a menu of options for what the company would potentially owe in “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT), a common agreement that lets local governments offer tax breaks with provisions attached. The agreement offers Meta qualified exemptions from both sales tax and property tax.

Depending on how many full-time equivalent staff Meta hires, the company could get tax breaks up to 80%. True, local teachers got a huge windfall, but this was on a tax bill that was substantially discounted and it will decline when construction winds down and the data centre becomes operational.

In fairness, per the Alberta Counsel’s Blyth, Alberta premier Daniele Smith promised “[n]o subsidies, no grants, no discounted power, no taxpayer backstop”. But she is not being honest. Shiza Wasi at Public Interest Alberta:

[…] The UCP has also confirmed a 2% hardware levy on grid-connected data centres drawing at least 75 MW, but this levy is fully creditable against provincial corporate income tax, meaning taxpayers will see little to no benefit.

I do not think anyone needs to be opposed to massive data centres to find this proposal and construction process objectionable. These ugly buildings can consume as much power as a large city, and we are being rushed into building them because Meta needs to run a bunch of Ubuntu virtual machines to power its A.I. gadget. These companies are going to dump something like $10 trillion over the next six years into this infrastructure buildout. And, somehow, they still expect tax breaks and secrecy.

‘Mark’ ⇥ colossus.com

I think Meta is a perversely interesting company which means this week I watched, as I do every year, its Connect presentation. It is once again a glimpse into what Meta aspires toward — Apple-quality hardware matched with Google-quality services — compared to what it actually does: track users’ digital and physical activities to sell ads.

Said hardware this year was interesting. In addition to a whole smattering of eyeglasses that look like slightly chunkier versions of classic glasses styles, there are now models without a camera.1 In an interview with Joanna Stern, Mark Zuckerberg avoided answering a question about whether they were created in response to overall privacy concerns about cameras on faces by turning it into a question about whether they were developed in the past two months to address recent criticism. But questions about the ethics of wearable cameras in normal-looking glasses have been around since they were released three years ago.

Meta also showed off a much slimmer and more normal-looking virtual reality headset; Zuckerberg compared the glasses’ approximately 100-gram weight to that of Apple’s Vision Pro. They will apparently ship in “Spring” for $1,300 USD, which means you could buy three of them for only a little more than a single Vision Pro. (For what it is worth, in a recent interview with Nilay Patel, Mark Gurman said he still thinks Apple’s glasses are coming next year.)

Finally, there was a prototype gadget that looked a little bigger than the body of an Apple Watch and which Zuckerberg says is designed to live on a keychain. It supposedly allows you to use the company’s Muse A.I. assistant in something that is not its glasses or a smartphone — the latter because Meta does not have a smartphone operating system and, I guess, does not want to develop a companion app exclusively for Japan. I feel like I have seen this before.

But as I watched the presentation, I was mainly thinking of Jeremy Stern’s very long profile of Zuckerberg in Colossus. Specifically, this part, a summary of Stern’s conversations with Meta Superintelligence Labs’ “competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background”:

AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face, and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus he is not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero, and to drive up his revenue by improving ads. He will use cash from the ad business — and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent — to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don’t care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier.

If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero, and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn’t commoditize, then at least he is not his competitors’ prisoner the way he’s been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he’s already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins.

I cannot see myself buying anything Meta releases; as curious as I have become with the company, I find it fundamentally repulsive. This part of the article from Stern, though, is a perfect encapsulation of why, regardless of having little success outside its core advertising business, Meta will keep going. My interpretation of this is that Meta has somehow harnessed controversy as a positive. Not only will people continue using its services regardless of how many bad news stories Meta endures, those very problems mean it is underestimated, so it can keep trying stuff and seeing what works.

  1. Zuckerberg underscored how important it was for glasses to be fashionable and have a range for different tastes and different faces. It occurred to me this is not something he could have credibly presented back in his hoodie-and-ill-fitting-jeans days, which is probably one reason for his rapid sartorial makeover. ↥︎

Apple: ‘Turn Off and Restrict Access to Apple Intelligence Features on Mac’ ⇥ support.apple.com

If you are uninterested in Apple Intelligence features, Apple has documentation on how to turn them off for Golden Gate, Tahoe, and Sequoia — kind of. While there are more granular controls for individual features in Golden Gate, Apple’s way of limiting access in older versions is only through Screen Time. But there is a trade-off: there is now no way to turn off Apple Intelligence entirely like there was in older versions. In Golden Gate, Apple Intelligence is just another system component. Whether you agree with Apple on that is your call, but one thing is a fact: it does not come cheap.

Under MacOS Sonoma, pre-Apple Intelligence, system files consumed 18.4 GB in Ars Technica’s testing. Golden Gate is a whopping 42.9 GB. Not all of this disparity is Apple Intelligence models — on my Mac, the various model directories add up to about 18 GB, give or take — but on a lower-spec MacBook Neo, iMac, or Mac Mini, that means around one-sixth of the drive is consumed by the system. That is considerable.

I do not think Apple should not have local models. But as it is surely the single largest system component now, consuming about the same space as an entire Sonoma installation, I think it is stingy of Apple to ship 256 GB base storage even on its lowest-priced computers. The A.I. memory shortages across the entire industry and Apple’s notorious protection of its margins may explain why the MacBook Air ships today with the same base storage as when Sonoma was released. If this is now a core part of the system, then base storage ought to be increased to compensate.

With Apple Watch Eavesdropping Features, What Is at Stake Is Public Perception ⇥ manualdousuario.net

Rodrigo Ghedin on the Audio Intelligence features in the new Apple Watch models:

And… it doesn’t matter. The message that sticks in people’s minds is that the Apple Watch has become a constantly listening device. And although the new feature only works on the just-announced watches (Series 12 and Ultra 4), the distrust extends to every Apple Watch in use, since they are visually indistinguishable.

In an announcement lasting just a few minutes, Apple threw in the trash a decade plus effort of trying to convince people that their iPhones aren’t listening to their conversations to serve ads hours later.

Given the widespread belief in this conspiracy theory — in one study, over half of surveyed people believed it was a plausible explanation for targeted advertising — it is not surprising that some companies have cynically exploited public perception even as others, like Apple, desperately push back. I have seen people using the settled Siri lawsuit to argue Apple admitted to using audio recordings to target advertising. It can publish documentation (PDF) now just as it put out a press release then about Siri.

On some level, Apple must realize it does not matter; it, too, is taking advantage of this popular belief despite these features likely being respectful of privacy. If people already think anything with a microphone is why they see certain ads, why not have some kind of useful passive transcribing feature? (This rhetorical question answers itself if privacy and consent matter to you.)

These Audio Intelligence features would feel more at home in a higher-trust environment with better privacy legislation. Unfortunately, we live in a world where everyone is a conspiracy theorist and, paradoxically, so much of what we do is surveilled and recorded. The Apple Watch contributes to both perceptions — even if it does not work that way.

App Tracking Transparency Changes Coming to the European Union ⇥ developer.apple.com

After agreeing in August with Germany’s competition authority to make changes to the App Tracking Transparency prompt, Apple has now announced the options available to developers. Unfortunately, the post on its Developer News page is terribly brief; here it is in its entirety:

As part of agreements with select European competition authorities, Apple is introducing changes to its App Tracking Transparency framework in the European Union. Beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers will have the option to use an alternative version of the App Tracking Transparency system prompt in the EU. The requirements for when you must seek permission to track users will remain the same. Due to legal requirements, only the alternative version of the system prompt is available for apps distributed in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania.

Learn more

Apple did not even bother to link to the specific section in its documentation. It is a shame because these changes are, for the most part, very good. There is a new prompt screen that addresses a complaint I have with App Tracking Transparency. Instead of being a small dialog box with almost no information, it is now a whole-screen sheet that describes the mechanism of tracking, and permits developers an option to link out to a page with a developer-provided explanation.

Developers are also now allowed to ask again for permission on an annual basis. Apple says this is “regardless of whether that choice was to accept or reject”, but I doubt many developers who got a green light the first time will ask again. This could be irritating, but Apple itself provides precedent for reminding users of their privacy preferences: iOS occasionally — perhaps every few months — reminds me that an app has access to my location or my photo library and asks me to confirm my choice.

If you are in the E.U. and you think reconfirming your tracking preferences annually will be annoying, you should turn off the system-wide setting to “Allow Apps to Request to Link Your Activity Across Companies”, which is currently called “Allow Apps to Request to Track”.

Overall, I think these changes are a moderate win for E.U. users. The new permission screen is both clearer and more informative. As Apple says in the post quoted above, this sheet is available to developers as an option throughout the E.U., and is the only version permitted in a handful of countries. I think Apple should roll this out worldwide.

Apple Releases Its OS 27 Updates ⇥ sixcolors.com

Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27. While it does not hit the thoughtful design highs of the pre-Yosemite era, Apple has corrected a bunch of problems it introduced in last year’s Tahoe release and, as a matter of fact, from the past decade of releases.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

I will go further: if you crank up the opacity of Liquid Glass under System Settings, Appearance, it is a downright promising visual interface language. Yes, I still have criticisms — of course I do — but these changes have made me feel excited for MacOS from a design perspective in a way I have not for years. Or maybe this is just such a relief from Tahoe that I am deluding myself. Either way, thumbs up.

Snell:

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

There is a similar function for making Safari Extensions, which I have not yet tried. I have tried the Shortcuts implementation a few times, though, and I love it because I am awful at making Shortcuts the old-fashioned way. This new version is so much less intimidating as a starting point.

I have to say, though, I was a little bit annoyed when I asked for a shortcut that validated my Markdown reference links. I now have one that works way better than the one I used to use, but instead of being an AppleScript or a shell script, it basically offloads the instructions I typed to a cloud A.I. model after adding a text input action. So, less intimidating, but it is now sometimes the case that a Shortcut is impenetrable magic on the business end. It would be better if it prioritized building local scripts because then, at least, I could learn something.

iOS 27 is pretty good, too. I feel a little bad every time I give Apple’s software quality two points out of a possible five in the annual Six Colors report card. It is only because I know Apple ought to be doing better. My experience with these releases has been far from perfect and there are still longstanding and embarrassing bugs I run into daily. But they seem more reliable and dependable than Apple’s operating systems have felt for years, though all I really know are MacOS and iOS.

A.I. Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out of Control ⇥ karlbode.com

Karl Bode:

Earlier this month a 27-year-old who had been employed at Anthropic for all of four months declared he was quitting the software company because he believed that software automation poses an existential risk to humankind.

[…]

The problem is – and shockingly the ad-based clickbait press didn’t do a very good job explaining this to anyone – there is no actual evidence that software automation is on the cusp of gaining full human awareness and soylent greening the entire eastern seaboard.

Oh, how I love a righteous rant.

Canadian Politicians Have Launched a New Push for Data Centres ⇥ breachmedia.ca

Marcus Werner, of the Breach, put together a video illustrating the persuasion tactics Canadian politicians are using as they argue for greater A.I. data centre development.

It is what referred me to the fracking discussion I referenced in the article I published last night, so I wanted to shout it out for that reason. But I could not find a good way to insert this video, and I thought it was worthy of its own link anyway.

iPhone 17 Model Popularity ⇥ birchtree.me

David Smith on Mastodon:

The eve of iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders seems a good time to look back at the iPhone 17 family’s adoption. Here’s the 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith.

Generally they followed the usual adoption pattern, and overall did very well ending at around 20% of total usage.

With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air’s 0.3%).

Matt Birchler adds:

This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David’s more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.

The apparent unpopularity of the iPhone Air is not what caught my eye. Instead, it is the percentage of iPhone 17e users: 0.5% of Widgetsmith users, and something like 1–2% of the total iPhone 17 generation in Birchler’s. (I am eyeballing the latter.)

Neither the Air nor the “E” phones are popular enough to be on the TelemetryDeck chart. Meanwhile, Counterpoint says the 17e is the seventh most popular smartphone in the world. The Air does not make Counterpoint’s top ten; neither do any folding phones. The 17 Pro Max and 17 Pro are, apparently, the second- and third-most popular smartphone models worldwide.

Why Is the iPhone Duo? ⇥ nytimes.com

Brian X. Chen, New York Times:

But even though they’ve been around for years, foldable phones aren’t particularly popular. They’re expensive, awkward and not as durable as regular smartphones. So why did Apple build one?

[…]

Foldable phones, which account for less than 2 percent of the handset market, may be the only part of the phone industry that will grow this year. IDC said it expected the chip-shortage-induced price increases to contribute to a 17 percent drop in worldwide smartphone sales this year — the steepest annual decline in history. However, sales of foldable phones could grow 12 percent to 22.9 million because of the iPhone Duo’s arrival, the research firm said.

It is worth noting Counterpoint’s stats blend book-style folding phones, like Google’s Pixel Fold and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra — yes, that is the real name — and regular-sized phones that flip in half. This is kind of important for the conclusion Chen draws, which is that this is a way for Apple to justify charging at least $2,000 USD for a smartphone. But I am curious if the ultra-expensive part of the market has sold as well as less-premium flip phones.

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, for example, starts at $1,100 USD, while its Fold8 jumps to a starting price of $1,900 USD. But the Flip8, which is very similar to the S26 Ultra, is just $100 USD more than its non-folding sibling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only person I know with a folding phone has one of the flip ones.1 But Google and Samsung do not have the brand cachet of Apple, and a $2,000 iPhone is an incredible status symbol.

The biggest question I have is whether folding phones become a mainstream category. The iPhone X’s thousand-dollar pricetag was a huge amount of money when it was released, but Apple had no trouble selling it and its subsequent thousand-plus-dollar phones. Just as importantly, however, is that it set a new standard that quickly flowed to the company’s less expensive models. Apple has not sold an iPhone with a home button since last year. Is the Duo a similar conceptual leap, or will a book-style folding phone always be a niche?

  1. If it were up to me, I wish Apple had introduced a flip phone instead. I do not want to carry an iPad-sized display; I want my iPhone to fit better in my pocket. It would not have been as much of a new or different experience, but I never had cause to so frequently repair the pocket linings of my pants until phones got this big. ↥︎

Live Rewind Is a Creepy Part of Apple’s Audio Intelligence Suite ⇥ support.apple.com

Apple held its annual September major product rollout today announcing, among other things, updated Apple Watch models with “Audio Intelligence” features. One of those features is “Live Rewind”:

A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, so the user can catch something they may have missed or are less familiar with. Users can ask Siri about the content of the text or save it to the Siri app to revisit later.

This feature is also coming to iPhone 16 and newer models. (Sorry, I misread the support document. Just Apple Watch.) Apple swears up and down it is doing all it can to make this private and secure, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is apparently not actually saved and is, instead, merely transcribed by a dedicated coprocessor. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it, too.

But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. Apple says they should be sufficiently notified Live Rewind is active because “an audible chime plays from the speaker on your Apple Watch, even if your Apple Watch is on silent or you have headphones connected”, plus the watch plays an animation, but it is not clear to me when this happens. It is not shown in Apple’s video. The impression I get is that Live Rewind is always running in the background and these notifications are only played after you double-click the Digital Crown to look at the text.

This feels like a glimpse of how Apple will market its inevitable wear-anywhere glasses product. I do not think it does enough to assuage privacy concerns. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them you have been passively recording them because, outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive.

Update: In addition to the press release and support page linked above, Apple also published a privacy overview document (PDF) with a little more information about Siri Recaps, another feature of Audio Intelligence. The part about Live Rewind is mostly a rehash of the privacy reassurances elsewhere.

LG’s Smart Televisions and Displays Are Rotten ⇥ youtube.com

Michael Crider, PCWorld:

[…] So somebody at LG decided that, in addition to the basic monitor driver and management app delivered to its users via Windows Update, it would slip in an additional program, “LG Monitor App Installer.” This extra bit of software includes McAfee, or an ad for it — as if there was any difference.

C. da Costa, Gadget Review:

This is bigger than one bad app. LG and Samsung smart monitors run the same operating systems as their smart TVs — webOS and Tizen — both already built for automatic content recognition and ad targeting. Acer’s monitor privacy policies permit sharing device data with advertisers. The trajectory mirrors the rise of free-to-play gaming: low barrier to entry, monetization creep once you’re locked in.

These findings were based on a Gamers Nexus investigation in July. But it is not an isolated incident.

This week, Gamers Nexus followed up with another blockbuster showing how LG’s smart televisions find other devices on the same network and, in some cases, record their activity; and, because they can recognize what is being played onscreen, LG tracks everything you watch, too. It is presumptively allowed do this because it presents a bunch of user agreements that anyone can bypass without reading, enables tracking by default, and buries all the opt-out stuff. Oh, and there is more.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

The video also demonstrated an LG TV’s ability to record sound around it, even when the TV isn’t online.

“We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plaintext, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG [if] the TV connects online again.”

LG told Harding it is only listening for the wake word, but Gamers Nexus was able to capture audio in a variety of different ways because there are so many microphones and, in many cases, so many vulnerabilities in LG’s software. If I had one criticism, it is that Gamers Nexus connects the voice recording and transcription to LG’s ads service — an apparently real-life version of the conspiracy theory. I do not think there is enough evidence to support that, even as speculation.

The transformation of seemingly every major company into, ultimately, vendors for advertising is an outcome basically everyone hates. The televisions tested by Gamers Nexus are thousands of dollars in Canada. That exchange of money used to be where the relationship ended, assuming the product did not need servicing. Now, though, selling ads on the screen itself prints so much money that it is nearly impossible to buy something different. You cannot vote with your wallet when advertisers are paying more.

The Age-Gating of History ⇥ heatherburns.tech

Heather Burns:

I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive.

It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened.

If you were in school in 2001, there were probably televisions playing live news coverage in your classroom or in the hallways. There were in mine.

I am with Burns, and with the greatest of respect — she was there that day. But that particular subreddit is an unfortunate example as, while I do not think it should be age-gated, it should be moderated far better. So many of the users there are not treating it as an archive or a way of learning, but as a puzzle where they can play detective.

Indigo Keeps Getting Great Feature Updates ⇥ bsky.app

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May. In the latest version, you can now swipe between different filtered timelines, the scroll position is synced between devices, and there is a new lower price point if you use it exclusively for a single network.

As for me, the one big thing I wanted at launch was the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts, and this was added some time ago. It works exactly as you might expect: you can group sets of your own accounts — my personal Bluesky and personal Mastodon are one set, while my Pixel Envy accounts are in another — and just toggle the two sets.

This is one of my very favourite iOS apps. Just a great piece of software made by some great people.

FBI Probes Service Selling Tens of Millions of Drivers Licenses ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, reports the company in question is IDScan:

You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target. That’s what happened here. And it’s what will happen with any such systems.

Dan Gillmor on Bluesky:

If you support “age verification” online, you are supporting a system that GUARANTEES privacy meltdowns — endangering all of us — because the giant databases of scanned IDs are perpetually hacked by criminals who sell private data.

I am opposed to identity verification, but this argument is not particularly effective for me because there are incredibly low-risk solutions. In Canada, for example, we have an interbank service called Interac that offers an identity verification service. I am not naïve, but I would entirely trust this bank-based system to verify me on a regular basis. In fact, I already do — like many Canadians, I use my banking information to log into government websites. Maybe this relatively safe proxy for a centralized identification system is unique to Canada.

I imagine this argument lands fairly well for lots of people elsewhere, however. The rapid introduction of age verification laws has produced a market for these businesses, but handing your identifying information to some random third-party should terrify you, as it is exactly the behaviour any security expert warns against doing. You have no idea who is able to access that scan of your driver’s license or what they can do with it. And, as it turns out, neither do some of these companies, either.

How Accurate Have Ed Zitron’s Predictions Been? ⇥ danluu.com

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style:

That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we of course cannot actually blame Andreesen for these companies trying to grow. There’s just this thing that he says is bad, and in his usual style, he pulls some person and says they’re the evil villain that’s to blame for this, and then moves on to the next non sequitur.

Instead of more carefully scrutinizing Zitron’s record, outlets like Vanity Fair are publishing soft interviews with him where he gets to make predictions like “large language models, when you remove all of the insane financialization, it’s probably a $30 billion-a-year industry”. Oh, sure, they ask a single question about wrong predictions since 2024, but he brushes it off by saying he has learned lots in those two years — Luu documents incorrect predictions all the way up until November 2025, after which “most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future” — and ends the interview by saying “[w]hat comes after the A.I. bubble is actually a little scarier”. Ominous.

The beauty of Zitron’s voluminous output, for him, is that there is a vast difference between what he actually writes and what people remember. Financial experts and more reputable journalists have raised plenty of concerns about how much money is being spent on developing this infrastructure, and how highly these companies are valued. But the words Zitron writes are far more incendiary and conspiratorial than many seem to remember. It is frustrating to see his many media experiences filling the role of the A.I. skeptic when there are far more qualified, sober, and accurate options. We have enough boosters; this is an industry that is co-signed by the world’s most powerful economies. We deserve better A.I. criticism in popular media.

About Half of U.S. Smartphone Owners Say They Spend Too Much Time Using It ⇥ pewresearch.org

William Bishop of Pew Research:

Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about right, while just 3% say they spend too little time using these devices.

Notably, 70% of smartphone owners in the U.S. aged 18–29 say they believe they use it too much. I am skeptical of public polling — maybe we are societally more approving of shaming our own device use — but this also tracks with what I hear casually from friends and family. Anecdotally, many people I know have expressed that they want to be on their phones less often.

But the editors of Andreessen Horowitz’s It’s Time to Build newsletter — hosted on Substack, a platform they are investors in — believe this behaviour actually indicates people are very happy. Ruby Thelot, professor of design and media studies at New York University and “astute tech observer”, says the heavy use of social media platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — Andreessen Horowitz invested in both, and Marc Andreessen is on Meta’s board; none of this is disclosed — is simply evidence we love them:

People en masse are getting on social media, by choice. From 2016 until now, the number of social media users has grown from 2.5B to close to 6B people. Enshittification isn’t real. It’s three TikToks in a trenchcoat, and, maybe, a book deal. It’s good for discourse but does not describe actual reality and user patterns.

Returning to Instagram. The average daily usage showcases an increase in time spent on Instagram every day as well. Users are coming back for more, in a highly competitive attention arena, year after year.

There is a lot of assumption in these two paragraphs, and I think the “close to 6B people” is worth examining to start. Thelot attributes this statistic in the chart above to Backlinko. It cites no source, but a web search indicates to me this originates with Manochi’s DataReportal, which disclaims “‘user identities’ may not represent unique human individuals” because, as the company explains on the sixth slide of its report, it may count multiple social media accounts or business accounts as individual identities. These are not necessarily people, and Manochi says it is improper to compare figures year over year as Thelot does. (And, to be fair, which Manochi also does on slide 321.)

A lack of rigour is not unique to this data point.

Thelot next shows a chart indicating daily Instagram use rose from 25 minutes in 2017 to nearly 34 in 2026. This is, to Thelot, simply evidence that people like using it and want more. But, to return to the Pew poll above, it seems that people do not feel good about spending more time on their smartphones. Though Pew did not ask (PDF) about social media specifically, roughly half of respondents aged 18–29 said it negatively affects their productivity. And, according to slide 337 of that Manochi report, 30.7–44.0% of people say they use social media to “fill up spare time”, trending higher for younger generations. It is plausible that more younger people are spending increasing amounts of time on social media apps and they do not feel good about it. In other words, the time spent numbers are not a good proxy for enjoyment or value.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

Regardless of whether you call it “addiction” or some kind of compulsive behaviour, it is plausible many people dislike their own actions but struggle to change them. It is also possible these products are designed to take advantage of that to extract more time out of each user.

Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins ⇥ nytimes.com

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link)

John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.”

[…]

This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who will retire this year. Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president and deputy of Mr. Ternus’s before retiring from Apple in 2022, has rejoined the company, three people familiar with her hiring said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Legros, who reports to Mr. Ternus, could act as his adviser and emissary to various parts of the company, the three people said.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple’s Phil Schiller is no longer going to run the App Store or oversee product events, reports Bloomberg. Schiller isn’t leaving Apple, but he is narrowing his responsibilities and working on unspecified projects.

Employees at Apple told Bloomberg that 66-year-old Schiller appears to be taking another step toward retirement.

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

Ternus has inherited that Apple. Regardless of how much he gives off the vibe of a cool Californian — by way of Philadelphia — who just cares about the best stuff, he is also selling ad space and making sure more people upgrade to Apple One.

Travelling With a Separatist Alberta Group That Thinks the CBC Are ‘Federalist Scumbags’ Publishing ‘Drivel’ ⇥ mcsweeneys.net

Joel Dryden, in a CBC News article with the headline “On the Road With Pro-Independence Albertans, One Small Town at a Time”:

The restaurant owner, who gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit the road this summer to talk independence, travelling with a group of people who also support the idea of Alberta becoming its own nation.

[…]

On the back of the vehicle, a Bible verse printed in script: Jeremiah 29:7 — “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Mike Skerrett, in a 2018 McSweeney’s article with the headline “I Traveled to a Diner In Trump Country to Write Another Article On Whether the President’s Supporters Still Want to, Quote, ‘Smash My Libtard Face In'”:

I came to this diner, The No Safe Space Café, to get a taste of the Real America. This America exists outside the liberal echo chambers, somewhere with real diversity of thought: The opinions of straight, white, Christian men.

Chris Scott — the “restaurant owner” driving the separatist campaign bus with Dryden aboard — has previously called the CBC “liars, thieves and Federalist bootlickers” who publish “drivel”. Replace the U.S.-centrism of the McSweeney’s piece with a Canadian vibe, and is it really all that different?

‘Here’s What’s Coming’ ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Here is a list of headlines; perhaps you will spot a theme:

All of these since January — and I excluded most rewrites of articles by Mark Gurman, Ming-Chi Kuo, and other well-known Apple rumour writers. Also, my list does not include articles about products rumoured to be announced at specific events. They also have another thing in common: nearly all are by Ryan Christoffel, who seems to have taken up the 9to5Mac beat for making listicles of Apple products that could be updated in the future. Cool.

Careful readers might think I listed one of these articles twice — the “15+ new products this fall” one. But this is because Christoffel originally published it in May, and then changed the date on it to August after making a few changes.

I do not know who this is supposed to serve. Maybe this is a play for search engine traffic or A.I. chatbot citations. Maybe it works pretty well, too, and maybe I should be less cynical about these kinds of churned-out listicles in a time when A.I. search features are capturing traffic that used to go to third-party websites. Or maybe this is all just filler when there is nothing newsworthy but you need to publish a dozen or so articles daily.

Update: D. Griffin Jones, formerly at Cult of Mac, says on Bluesky:

It’s a secret third thing: Google Discover, Google News, Flipboard, Apple News, and other algorithmic aggregators. Articles like that tend to reach a much broader audience.

“One listicle a day” was our goal at Cult of Mac before I was laid off. It’s a tough time out there for independent blogs. The Google AI overview is devastating.

I obviously have no authority to give business advice. I would only point out that it is disappointing to hear about chasing referral strategies. One would think the pivot to video era would be treated as a cautionary tale and not something to repeat — if one, I suppose, is not responsible for staff and paycheques.