Link Log

Checking in on Some Pro-Hate-Speech Social Networks ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

The Agence France-Presse reporting on the U.S. president’s social-media-and-cryptocurrency-and-maybe-nuclear-fusion operation:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) reported revenue of less than US$1 million for the three months ending March 31, according to a company filing.

Under $4 million in annual revenue is less than how much Twitter was earning in 2009 — unadjusted for inflation — an amount Steven Levy described as “modest”.

Speaking of Twitter, let us check in on SpaceX which, after a series of totally normal business deals, now owns the company and is preparing to trade publicly. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt:

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion [in Twitter/X revenue] by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. […]

Earlier this year, a judge found against Elon Musk in a lawsuit filed by X against advertisers claiming they staged an illegal boycott.

The SpaceX prospectus, by the way, is one of the funniest documents to ever live on the sec.gov domain. It is lucky the business it is known for is so damn photogenic because it is, at present, a profitable satellite internet provider with side businesses of space exploration and artificial intelligence that each lose money. (How it internally accounts for the cost of sending Starlink satellites into orbit is a fantastic question.) And the present business model of the latter is something Patrick Boyle described as “renting GPUs to a competitor on terms that can vanish in a fiscal quarter”. Yet the company still claims the size of its total addressable market is over $28 trillion, or over one-fifth of the entire world’s GDP.

Even so, a $1.75–2 trillion valuation is plausible simply because of Musk. Similarly, and back to that AFP article:

According to its filing, TMTG generated US$900,000 in revenue during the first quarter, a paltry amount for a company valued at US$2.47 billion on the stock market.

That valuation is not much; at time of writing, it is worth about as much as Central Garden & Pet, owners of Nylabone and McKenzie plant seeds. That company last quarter posted revenues one thousand times greater than TMTG, with profit margins of over 12%. Nevertheless, TMTG has a connection to the U.S. president, so it is similarly valued. Lots of good, normal stuff happening in the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

Iris, a Photo History Explorer ⇥ irisphotos.app

Tyler Hall (finally) released Iris, and it is excellent:

And somewhere along the way the whole emotional center of the thing shifted. I set out to build an anti-Photos utility — a search engine for a hard drive. What I actually ended up with is a memory keeper. Open a photo today and Iris tells you the date, surfaces “16 items on this day,” drops a pin on the map, and lists the people in the frame with their ages quietly calculated from their birthdays. That is not a utility. That is the opposite of anti-anything.

I have been testing Iris for a couple of months and I think it is delightful. It reads all the photo libraries you point it at — your system library, whether that is in iCloud or local, and any folders you want like the one that contains your Lightroom edits, for example — and makes them accessible in a single, giant view.

But that is not the coolest part. No, that is that it lets you explore your tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of photos in a way that treats each of them as little memory boxes. So often, it is not just a picture of your kid, or your dog, or your dinner; it is a time you would like to remember. There are a bunch of things in each file that can bring you back to that moment. Photos does a poor job of that; Iris, on the other hand, is made for exactly that, something Hall takes seriously. How many apps are there with a manifesto?

Iris is great, old-school, indie Mac software.

Last.fm Announces It Has Gone Independent ⇥ support.last.fm

After nearly twenty years under CBS ownership, Last.fm is once again independent:

Your account, your listening history, and your data remain exactly where they are. The team building Last.fm is the same. The service continues as normal.

It is difficult to know whether it is riskier for Last.fm to be independent or under the banner of the hilariously corrupt Paramount Skydance conglomerate, but I imagine it would not — uh — last long if the leadership of the latter continues making cuts. I am happy to be a paying subscriber to a service I care about, and am excited to learn what comes next.

The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more reviewers. My contention is that adding reviewers is not a solution to the problem of App Store curation, and the belief in such a solution is a myth. I don’t claim that hiring more reviewers would make app review slower. Rather, I think that meaningful, effective curation can’t be measured simply by the amount of available labor, much like [Fred] Brooks argues that the possibility of measuring useful work in units of time, man-months, is a myth.

Apple markets the App Store as a “curated storefront”, but that is not meaningfully true if it is serving up, as Apple says, about two million apps. Meanwhile, as Johnson writes, “nobody worries about scams in Apple Arcade […] a truly curated service”.

The thing is that Apple’s App Store should have a carefully selected inventory of apps. That is Apple’s whole brand: premium, highly-desirable products, and people are willing to pay a little more. The App Store does not match that promise. I think the direction of regulatory and court decisions on the governance of iOS app distribution could be a gift for more selective curation, the kind of thing for which some third-party developers would want to pay extra compared to the competing third-party app marketplaces that would also be available.

Alas, we are on the cusp of another WWDC during which Apple seems unlikely to make major changes to software distribution across its many “post-P.C.” platforms.

FTC Settles With Cox Media Group and Two Others Who Lied About Using Device Microphones to Collect Ad Targeting Data ⇥ ftc.gov

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

The 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’ smart devices and that consumers had opted into such targeting.

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.

For 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”.

Like 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:

According to the complaints, this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers’ conversations or use voice data at all — nor did the service accurately place ads in customers’ desired locations. Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling — at a significant markup — email lists obtained from other data brokers.

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 — if crank websites cover this settlement at all. As of writing, I could not find it on either the Daily Mail or Zero Hedge.

Texas Attorney General Sues Meta, Claiming It Is Lying About WhatsApp’s End-to-End Encryption ⇥ arstechnica.com

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton:

Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against Meta Platforms Inc. and WhatsApp LLC (collectively “WhatsApp”) after the company misled consumers regarding the strength and scope of its privacy protections for its messaging app, WhatsApp.

Paxton is alleging (PDF) Meta is fully lying about the end-to-end encryption promise of WhatsApp in this wild lawsuit.

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica:

The sole factual evidence cited for the claims is an article published last month by Bloomberg. It reported that the US Commerce Department’s 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’s agents sent an email outlining the probe’s preliminary findings.

[…]

Thursday’s lawsuit doesn’t indicate that the AG’s 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’s device only after they have been decrypted using the decryption keys available only to the reporting party.

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.

Earlier 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 Găitan. Găitan writes:

By the end of this article, you’ll understand not just that WhatsApp’s privacy model is broken — but exactly how it’s 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.

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 — and, indeed, these lawsuits — allege. Găitan 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.

That leaves four possible vulnerabilities Găitan 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 Găitan 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, Găitan points to research claiming it is possible for WhatsApp to surreptitiously modify the participants in a group chat.

For those keeping track, that leaves basically one vulnerability — the latter group chat problem — that would satisfy the kinds of claims being made in these lawsuits: that Meta has “unrestricted access to users’ communications”; that Meta and WhatsApp “have access to all WhatsApp users’ encrypted communications in their entirety”. One could make the case — and I certainly have — 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 Găitan’s piece as all of them degrade WhatsApp’s privacy promise.

But 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.

‘How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart’ ⇥ 404media.co

Samantha Cole, 404 Media:

On 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. — the sun had been up for less than an hour — 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.

[…]

The 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.

It almost goes without saying, but the “paywall” is — or was; the app has been removed — an in-app payment from which Apple takes a 15–30% cut.

Apple released its annual justification for running software distribution through the App Store — it told European regulators it actually has five, so maybe this press release only concerns the one accessible from an iPhone — 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”.

Of Movely, the TTP said in its report:

Likewise, an App Store search for “adult AI” returned an ad for Movely – 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’s 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’s shirt, we entered the prompt “topless.” The app immediately generated four versions of the woman nude from the waist up. It required a paid subscription to download the AI images.

TTP could not reach Movely’s developer, FES2 Inc., for comment. Emails sent to the developer bounced back as undeliverable.

(For clarity, the TTP says it used A.I.-generated images of women to test these apps.)

The 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:

As powerful AI development tools drive a surge in app submissions, Apple’s App Review process has seamlessly scaled to handle the volume and to help ensure every new app and app update meets the App Store’s high standards for privacy, security, and quality.

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.

Ontario Police Are Fighting to Keep Their Spyware Secret ⇥ thestar.com

Betsy Powell, the Star:

Essentially spyware, an ODIT [on‑device investigative tool] can grant almost unlimited access. Investigators can capture screenshots, monitor keypresses, access emails and text messages — including those that are encrypted — and even remotely activate microphones and cameras. All without the owner knowing.

By August, police announced 23 arrests, 279 charges, and more than $9 million in recovered vehicles.

But the case has also done something else: It has pulled back the curtain on how police forces in Ontario — not just in Windsor, but in Toronto and Peel Region — are now using these powerful technologies to reach deep inside suspects’ 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.

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.

Meta Secured Over $3 Billion in Tax Breaks in Louisiana to Build a Data Centre ⇥ sherwood.news

Jon Keegan, of Robinhood’s Sherwood News:

A 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 — enough to build 33 new high schools, pay the salaries of all the state’s 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’t respond to requests for comment.)

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.

Bill C–22 Can Be Corrected ⇥ thestar.com

Justin Ling, the Star:

Yet Bill C-22 doesn’t mandate backdoors nor force companies to introduce any. It explicitly states the government cannot compel companies to introduce “systemic vulnerability” into their services. And it doesn’t give cops or spies new authority to intercept Canadians’ communications; it simply creates a process enlisting companies to help out with doing so.

Ottawa is now scrambling to correct the record. Anandasangaree will reply to the Republicans, conveying “this legislation does not provide for indiscriminate access to devices or communications and does not require companies to weaken encryption and introduce so-called ‘backdoors,’” according to a spokesperson. (The U.S. and the U.K., they also noted, already have these powers; Signal hasn’t withdrawn from either country.)

So the bill is not quite the nightmare some have made it out to be. But there are still some big issues.

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 “feasible technology” 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.

Apple, 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.

Bill C–22 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–22 has new powers requiring the retention of metadata. It seems to me that a systemic vulnerability — 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 — might not be found in something like metadata retention, which is what apparently concerns Signal.

Rich Guy Quote Journalism ⇥ stringinamaze.net

Peter Shamshiri:

The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.” It’s surprisingly common, and once you notice it you’ll 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’s taken for granted in many newsrooms that a person’s wealth imbues their opinions with newsworthiness.

Karl Bode has called this “CEO Said a Thing! journalism”, and it is all over the place. I think Shamshiri’s broader definition is useful, too, especially in lower-stakes situations.

This 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.

Separate Lawsuits Claim OpenAI and Perplexity Are Sharing User Data With Third Parties for Targeted Advertising ⇥ techpolicy.press

Madeline Batt, Tech Policy Press:

The 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.

The lawsuit targeted generative AI company Perplexity, along with Meta and Google, alleging they disclosed transcripts of users’ conversations with chatbots for targeted advertising. […]

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.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

A 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 — and targeted advertising behemoths — Meta and Google, without obtaining proper user consent.

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:

OpenAI represented that ‘untraining’ or ‘reverse-training’ 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 ‘learned’ from.

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.

Signal Warns It Would Pull Out of Canada if Made to Comply With Bill C–22 ⇥ theglobeandmail.com

Marie Woolf, the Globe and Mail:

Secure messaging service Signal, which uses end-to-end encryption, is warning it would withdraw from Canada if asked to compromise its users’ privacy under Bill C-22, Ottawa’s proposed lawful access legislation.

[…]

The bill would require “core providers” — which would later be defined through regulations — to retain metadata for up to a year.

Are lawmakers capable of learning from their peers elsewhere? Do we have to do this kind of thing every year, country-by-country?

We Are All Swimming in A.I. Murk ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

To 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 “AI psychosis,” 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’s 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’s AI? Why does this sound or look or read so weird? Does this person just write like this? Is this a person at all?

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. — 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.

Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy Launch Indigo ⇥ aaron.vegh.ca

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.

Aaron Vegh:

Today, Ben McCarthy and I are launching Indigo. It’s a full-featured client for both Mastodon and Bluesky, available on iPhone, iPad and macOS. Go get it on the App Store!

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.

Ben McCarthy:

Indigo 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’re not seeing them twice. You can toggle between each version as well as perform actions like quoting or replying to both posts simultaneously. We’ve done a lot to make the experience of using two different services at once feel seamless.

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.

There 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.

Open standards are pretty great, hey?

The New York Times Published an A.I.-Fabricated Quote Attributed to Pierre Poilievre ⇥ bsky.app

On 14 April, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the New York Times’ Canada bureau chief, quoted Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, calling the spate of floor crossers “turncoats”. He apparently said this — and more — 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.

Those 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”.

The Walrus’ Michelle Cyca, on Bluesky [sic]:

personally I think it’s a very big deal that the Canada bureau chief for the @nytimes.com — certainly one of the highest-paid journalists in the country — asked an unspecified “AI tool” what Poilievre said & published its AI-hallucinated quotes in her reporting.

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.

How 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 — a university professor — 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?

In a Privacy Improvement, Venmo Transactions Will Be Visible to Friends by Default ⇥ theverge.com

Jay Peters, the Verge:

Venmo 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.

I remain too dumb to understand why you would want financial transactions to be visible to anyone but yourself.

Ed Zitron Is Not an A.I. Skeptic ⇥ theargumentmag.com

Kelsey Piper, the Argument:

At some point, pretending that how people use AI is a complete mystery is just lying to your audience. And at some point, [Ed] Zitron’s “layers of skepticism” attitude — 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 — leaves one buried in too many impossibility assertions to actually sort them by plausibility.

It is radical skepticism, ultimately arriving at “perhaps nothing we see is real,” rather than principled skepticism about the relatively weakest links in the companies’ case for investment.

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.

Each 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 — it can be substantial — 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.

There 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.

  1. While 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. ↥︎

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: Block Ads in iPhone, iPad, and Mac Apps ⇥ magiclasso.co

Do you want to block ads and trackers across all apps on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple TV — not just in Safari?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock – the ad blocker designed for you.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock

The new App Ad Blocking feature in Magic Lasso Adblock v5.0 builds upon our powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking, extending protection to:

  • News apps

  • Social media

  • Games

  • Other browsers like Chrome and Firefox

All ad blocking is done directly on your device, using a fast, efficient Swift-based architecture that follows our strict zero data collection policy.

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.