Link Log

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the E.U. ⇥ ccc.de

Thorin Klosowski, Techdirt:

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people.

Elina Eickstädt, Chaos Computer Club:

Just a quick reminder: Client-side scanning is not only error-prone nonsense, but would also be illegal from the outset. This is because an obligation to monitor chats to the planned abstruse extent is disproportionate and would also contradict the European Court of Justice. Indiscriminate scanning of all chat communication content represents the most serious infringement of fundamental rights imaginable, eclipsing even the brazen idea of data retention.

Fighting over Chat Control is becoming an annual tradition.

U.S. State Department Wants to Use Tech Companies as Leverage Over European Policy ⇥ techpolicy.press

Dean Jackson, Tech Policy Press:

The Trump administration’s ambitions have little to do with safeguarding free expression from tyranny. If they did, the administration would not be searching for cherry-picked examples of content removed under the DSA. Instead, they are using tech policy at the State Department as a tool in their project to reshape the post-war international order in Trump’s image — at the expense of the transatlantic alliance and, potentially, the lives and liberties of activists in authoritarian settings who formerly accepted grants from the US government.

One of the problems with the world tech industry being consolidated in the United States is the country’s ability to use it as leverage against reasonable laws and local standards. This has been the case for decades, but it is more worrisome as tech companies have become sprawling behemoths dominating a range of markets, and — obviously — with this particular president in the White House.

The Antennagate Code Patch ⇥ hachyderm.io

Yes, it is 2025, but Sam Henri Gold decided to pick apart the changes between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1, which changed the number of bars shown in moderate-to-low reception areas:

The actual calculation is dead simple. When converting signal strength to bars, CommCenter loads each threshold from memory and compares until it finds the right range.

[…]

For example, here you need -107 [dBm] or better signal to see 3 bars.

These values are not the same as those found by AnandTech in 2010, but they are close. And, as Richard Gaywood pointed out at the time, the effect of the attenuation could bring a five-bar signal down to a single bar simply because iOS used to display five bars even in areas with mediocre coverage.

Cory Doctorow Turned His Word of the Year Into a Whole Book ⇥ theguardian.com

In January 2023, Cory Doctorow described the way social media evolves, eventually broadening the theory and giving it the name “enshittification”:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

It did not matter that Doctorow’s original essay is based on something untrue. While there is possibly “a mass exodus [underway from] Facebook” — given the company’s 2024 transition to reporting users of its “family of apps” instead of individual products — in the quarters following Doctorow’s article, Meta posted growing numbers (PDF) of Facebook users. The vibe in Doctorow’s writing was compelling. People started throwing around “enshittification” to describe the worsening of all kinds of online services, and then the analog world, and then everything. Absolutely everything.

The American Dialect Society made “enshittification” its word of the year.

Before all that, however, Doctorow first used “enshittification” to describe Amazon. Now, Doctorow is about to release a new book that manages to stretch this theory to 352 pages. If I sound skeptical, it is because I read an excerpt published in the Guardian, expanding upon the blog post about Amazon that introduced the term. This is a company I entirely believe is deserving of this kind of scorn. Doctorow correctly observes Amazon’s founding premise was to sell products for remarkably low prices, famously sacrificing profitability in its nascent years, a promise that disintegrated as it became the online shopping destination.

Shopping on Amazon sucks now. It sounds, based on Doctorow’s article, like it also sucks to sell on Amazon now, too. But some of Doctorow’s criticisms ring hollow. For example:

Not that you can find lower prices through anything as simple as sorting your search results by price. The merchants that dominate the search listings will play games with quantity to have the result with the lowest price, even if the price per unit is much higher. For example, a four-pack of AAs priced at $3.99 is more expensive per battery than a 16-pack priced at $10 (ie $1 versus $0.63), but sort-by-lowest-price will bury the better deal on the third or fourth page of results.

Amazon’s search engine is pretty terrible, but this is just normal discounts-at-scale stuff. If it were ranked per-unit instead, this 800-count pack would probably rank near the top at just $0.19 each, but then Doctorow might complain about the company putting a $150 box of batteries as one of the lowest-priced items.

Doctorow:

Now Amazon is in the terminal stage. We’re all still stuck to the platform, but we get less and less value out of it. And because we’re all still there, buying Prime and starting (and ending) our purchase planning with Amazon’s enshittified search results, the merchants who rely on selling to us are stuck there, too, earning less and less from every sale.

I am not sure what I am meant to take from the “terminal” diagnosis of Amazon. I agree it all sucks. But there are plenty of thriving businesses that treat their customers with contempt — Adobe, Rogers, Canadian airlines — and I do not see how one of the most valuable and, now, profitable companies on the planet is inching toward death’s door.

I will probably read the book. I am hoping for something more nuanced, but perhaps I am expecting too much when there is a poop emoji on the cover.

The Future of the Sneaker Business First Requires a Future ⇥ defector.com

Corbin Smith, Defector (gift link):

Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour: These companies do not actually spin thread, tan leather, vulcanize rubber, or even put together the shoe. They design prototypes of a product and then facilitate all the actions necessary to make money off it. They pressure supplies and manufacturers at every level of the manufacturing process, send the product all over the world, sell it at a markup. The people in the brand offices coordinate that labor; the people in those factories actually do it. This is globalization, and it encompasses every transaction in the world economy.

To walk the floor at The Materials Show, an industry event that goes down four times a year — there’s two in Portland, home of Nike, Adidas of America, and several other major activewear concerns, and another pair in Boston, the home of New Balance — is to see that grand abstraction made flesh. In the aisles, a parade of designers, materials acquisition people, and executives clad in Activewear Professional go from booth to booth, look at threads and rubbers and leathers, chat with vendors, and take little notes. “The show is about sourcing raw materials, mostly for the footwear industry,” Hisham Muhareb, the founder and owner of The Materials Show, tells me. “Nike, Adidas, Columbia, Reebok, New Balance — their product teams come here and they meet new vendors, meet their old vendors, talk about materials, components, and process.”

So you can see why I needed to be there. […]

I savoured this essay when I first read it a couple of days ago, and it has been sitting with me ever since. It is tremendous. It is the kind of thing that makes me love paying for Defector, maintaining the kind of subscriber relationship a big corporation could only dream about. You might not care much about shoes or apparel, but I think you will appreciate this article anyway.

Microsoft Uses a Thousand Words to Justify Some New Office Icons ⇥ microsoft.design

I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them.

Jeff Johnson, quoting me:

“So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good”

This *should* be the justification. In other words, you don’t really need to justify something that’s self-evidently good, only something that’s self-evidently bad. This is the problem — the badness of Liquid Glass — not the lack of justification.

I completely agree. My sentence continues “…self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same”. I wish it was obvious why this should be the case, not something that was preemptively defended.

Take, for example, this long article by Jon Friedman of Microsoft announcing the rollout of new application icons:

[…] That’s the paradigm shift; Microsoft 365 has always empowered productivity but the driving force of the UX was often app features or the tools themselves. Today, the driving force is the outcome you desire.

With that paradigm shift come significant changes to the UX discipline itself and how we approach product making. Longer cycles of heads-down development used to be followed by a big reveal of big changes. Today, with model capabilities rapidly emerging and our learning as UX practitioners rapidly advancing — including becoming more technical as a discipline — product evolution is happening in continuous waves. Research shows changes to iconography are almost always received as a signal for product changes and in an era of ongoing, smaller shifts, the icons should reflect that. As such, we embraced the idea of “evolution, not revolution” throughout our design process.

This try-hard justification made me think of Johnson’s post. It is over a thousand words and I do not believe I view these icons differently after finishing it. The new icons are fine — very Microsoft, in that the company has produced some spectacular-looking 3D renders and illustrations completely unrelated to the actual icons I will be seeing on my desktop when this update is released.

How Writing Leads to Thinking ⇥ historians.org

Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History:

[…] You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before you write, but eventually, if you work at it hard enough, it will come. Thought does emerge from writing. Something ineffable happens when you write down a thought. You think something you did not know you could or would think and it leads you to another thought almost unbidden.

Someone — I am not sure who — surfaced this essay on Bluesky or Mastodon as I was midway through polishing my piece about Liquid Glass. It was motivating, and the part I quoted above perfectly describes how I felt as I was writing it. I distinctly remember writing this paragraph:

Apple justifies these decisions by saying its redesigned interfaces are “bringing greater focus to content”. I do not accept that explanation. Instead of placing tools in a distinct and separated area, they bleed into your document, thus gaining a similar level of importance as the document itself. I have nothing beyond my own experience to back this up. Perhaps Apple has user studies suggesting something different; if it does, I think it should publicly document its research. But, in my experience, the more the interface blends with what I am looking at, the less capable I am of ignoring it. Clarity and structure are sacrificed for the illusion of simplicity offered by a monochromatic haze of an interface.

It was important to me to try and solve Liquid Glass on the terms Apple offered, and the “greater focus” explanation was something that had been stuck in my head since Alan Dye spoke of it at WWDC. I could not think of why it felt wrong, only that it did not sit right with me. But when I started writing this, the “similar level of importance as the document itself” idea came to me out of nowhere and exactly reflects how I feel. It is a far better explanation than anything I had consciously thought about, and I doubt I would have arrived there without writing it down.

Obviously, writing is something that speaks to me, Hunt, and many others. Each person may arrive at thoughts and ideas in different ways. For me, though, any time I am stuck on a problem where writing could play any role, it is most often the tool I use to turn scattered questions into something coherent. I have no authority to give advice, so here is some anyway: next time you are stuck on something — maybe a problem at work, or a question at home — try writing it out.

Bending to U.S. Government Pressure, Apple, Google Remove ICE Reporting Apps ⇥ cnbc.com

Dan Mangan, CNBC:

Google on Friday joined Apple in removing from its online store apps that can be used to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other law-enforcement authorities.

Apple on Thursday night said it was removing ICEBlock and other similar apps from its App Store that are used to track authorities.

Apple’s move came after direct pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi, and amid controversy over the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration law with ICE agents and other authorities.

Joseph Cox, 404 Media:

“I am incredibly disappointed by Apple’s actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move,” Joshua Aaron told 404 Media. “ICEBlock is no different from crowd sourcing speed traps, which every notable mapping application, including Apple’s own Maps app, implements as part of its core services. This is protected speech under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.”

If you believe ICE is simply a law enforcement agency operating within the normal protocols of the justice system — and, by extension, that law enforcement behaviour is generally reasonable and trustworthy — apps that allow people to anonymously report sightings could be seen as targeted harassment. I could understand why Apple might remove such an application in that high-trust environment. However, if you believe ICE is a hostile expression of state power — the flimsy justifications used to identify ostensibly undocumented immigrants, the suspension of due process, and the domestic surveillance machine paint a pretty bleak picture — then apps allowing people to protect themselves against this power seem are justifiable.

The U.S. government does not have the authority to demand the removal of these lawful apps. But it does have the authority to make Apple and Google pay dearly if they do not comply. Perhaps Apple finds its products will be implicated in higher tariffs, or the antitrust cases against both companies will have stiffer penalties. Apple knows how to work with authoritarian states, which I do not mean as a compliment, and it is applying the same playbook here.

At least with Google’s devices, sideloading is an option. Apple’s platform control is both a guarantee and a liability. I write this with the best of intentions: ICEBlock’s platform exclusive design has now become a problem for it. The best way to make these kinds of apps resilient is to put them on the web, though I am unsure how reliable push notifications are in web apps on iOS.

Liquid Glass; Why Now? ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits, had some very kind things to say about my Liquid Glass piece. I also liked Engst’s attempt to answer the question of “why?”:

Why now? The answer may partly lie in available processing power. The balance between usability and aesthetics has always been informed by technical capabilities. Consider a few dates from Apple’s history: […]

Twenty-five years after alpha channels began appearing in our user interfaces, I think many of us have taken for granted the soft shadows and smooth corners enabled by translucent pixels. Back then, there were plenty of people who were worried about the performance impact of all these effects, just as there are now about Liquid Glass. I get it; I am not arguing that opinion is wrong or misguided.

Personally, however, I know my computer has capabilities wildly disproportionate to my actual use. Sometimes I will actually use that performance, but not most of the time. If a little bit of the M1 Pro in this Mac can go toward the stuff I see every day, I think that is a fair trade-off. If my iPhone can draw real-time lens distortion and chromatic aberration, that rocks. I think that is worth exploring.

Lawyers Caught Using A.I. Explain Why They Did It ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler and Jules Roscoe, 404 Media:

To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any individual case and the sanctions against lawyers, rather than the often elaborate excuses that lawyers told the court when they were caught. Using Charlotin’s database as a starting point, we then pulled court records from around the country for dozens of cases where a lawyer offered a formal explanation or apology. Pulling this information required navigating clunky federal and state court record systems and finding and purchasing the specific record where the lawyer in question tried to explain themselves (these were often called “responses to order to show cause.”) We also reached out to lawyers who were sanctioned for using AI to ask them why they did it. Very few of them responded, but we have included explanations from the few who did.

A May 2024 Stanford study found A.I. legal research tools would invent case law in one-sixth to one-third of searches.

What is striking about 404’s reporting is how many of these lawyers simply disclaim responsibility. I know few people want to admit to being lazy and incautious, but the number of these expensive professionals who blame their assistants instead of taking responsibility for their own filings is shameful.

U.K Demands Access to British Citizens’ End-to-End Encrypted iCloud Data ⇥ ft.com

Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times:

The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption.

[…]

Apple made a complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over the original demand, backed by a parallel legal challenge from Privacy International and Liberty, another campaign group. That case was due to be heard early next year but the new order may restart the legal process.

When U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced in August that “the UK has agreed to drop its mandate for Apple to provide a ‘back door’”, I stressed the ambiguity in her statement. I had no additional information, but the wording of her tweet was vague.

Reporters like Tripp Mickle, at the New York Times, and Annabelle Timsit and Joseph Menn, of the Washington Post, were too eager to claim the U.K. would wholly abandon its pursuit of customer data. Neither allowed for different interpretations of Gabbard’s tweet. Journalists like these have sources who could have offered clarity. It is unclear in either article whether they did reach out to their contacts; if they did, their stories were misleading even with — or perhaps because of — that information.

Anyway, this sucks. I do not think Advanced Data Protection is coming back to the U.K. any time soon.

That Secret Service SIM Farm Story Is Bogus ⇥ cybersect.substack.com

Robert Graham, clarifying the bad reporting of the big SIM farm bust in New York:

The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical terms that demonstrate their understanding of typical SIM farm crimes. The claim that they will likely find other such SIM farms in other cities likewise shows they understand this is a normal criminal activity and not any special national security threat.

One of the things we must always keep in mind is that press releases are written to persuade. That is as true for businesses as it is for various government agencies. In this case, the Secret Service wanted attention, so they exaggerated the threat. And one wonders why public trust in institutions is falling.

Google Provides Feedback on the Digital Markets Act ⇥ blog.google

Something I missed in posting about Apple’s critical appraisal of the Digital Markets Act is its timing. Why now? Well, it turns out the European Commission sought feedback beginning in July, and with a deadline of just before midnight on 24 September. That is why it published that statement, and why Google did the same.

Oliver Bethell, Google’s “senior director, competition”, a job title which implies a day spent chuckling to oneself:

Consider the DMA’s impact on Europe’s tourism industry. The DMA requires Google Search to stop showing useful travel results that link directly to airline and hotel sites, and instead show links to intermediary websites that charge for inclusion. This raises prices for consumers, reduces traffic to businesses, and makes it harder for people to quickly find reliable, direct booking information.

Key parts of the European tourism industry have already seen free, direct booking traffic from Google Search plummet by up to 30%. A recent study on the economic impact of the DMA estimates that European businesses across sectors could face revenue losses of up to €114 billion.

The study in question, though published by Copenhagen Business School, was funded by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a tech industry lobbying firm funded in part by Google. I do not have the background to assess if the paper’s conclusions are well-founded, but it should be noted the low-end of the paper’s estimates was a loss of €8.5 billion, or just 0.05% of total industry revenue (page 45). The same lobbyists also funded a survey (PDF) conducted online by Nextrade Group.

Like Apple, Google clearly wants this law to go away. It might say it “remain[s] committed to complying with the DMA” and that it “appreciate[s] the Commission’s consistent openness to regulatory dialogue”, but nobody is fooled. To its credit, Google posted the full response (PDF) it sent the Commission which, though clearly defensive, has less of a public relations sheen than either of the company’s press releases.

U.S. Federal Trade Commission Settles With Amazon Just Two Days Into Trial ⇥ ftc.gov

In 2023 Lina Khan, then-chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, sued Amazon over using (PDF) “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions” and “knowingly complicat[ing] the cancellation process”. Some people thought this case was a long-shot, or attempted to use Khan’s scholarship against her.

Earlier this week, the trial began to adjudicate the government’s claims which, in addition to accusing Amazon itself, also involved charges against company executives. It was looking promising for the FTC.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.

Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.

Then, just two days into the trial, the FTC announced it had reached a settlement:

The Federal Trade Commission has secured a historic order with Amazon.com, Inc., as well as Senior Vice President Neil Lindsay and Vice President Jamil Ghani, settling allegations that Amazon enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent, and knowingly made it difficult for consumers to cancel. Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices, and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.

As usual for settlements like these, Amazon will admit no wrongdoing. The executives will not face liability, something Adam Kovacevich, head of the Chamber of Progress, a tech industry lobbying group, said today was a “wild … theory” driven by “Khan’s ego”. Nonsense. The judge in the case, after saying Amazon broke the law, gave credence to the concept these executives were personally liable for the harm they were alleged to have caused.

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya on X:

Based on my initial read, do the executives need to do anything separate from that? Do they pay any fines? Are they being demoted? Are they subject to extra monitoring? Do they need to admit any guilt whatsoever? The answers, as far as I can tell are no, no, no, no, and no. What’s worse, the order applies to the executives for only three years — seven years less than the company.

Two-and-a-half billion is a lot of dollars in the abstract. CIRP estimates there are 197 million U.S. subscribers to Amazon Prime, which costs anywhere from $7 to $15 per month. For the sake of argument, assume everyone is — on average — on the annual plan of $11.58 per month. It will take barely more than one billing cycle for Amazon to recoup that FTC settlement. The executives previously charged will bear little responsibility for this outcome.

Those million-dollar inauguration “investments”, as CBS News put it, sure are paying off.

Privacy Commissioner of Canada Releases Findings of Investigation Into TikTok ⇥ priv.gc.ca

Catharine Tunney, CBC News:

The immensely popular social media app TikTok has been collecting sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of Canadians under 13 years old, a joint investigation by privacy authorities found.

[…]

The privacy commissioners said TikTok agreed to enhance its age verification and provide up-front notices about its wide-ranging collection of data.

Off the top, the Privacy Commissioner’s report was limited in scope and did not examine “perceived risks to national security” since they were not related to “privacy in the context of commercial activity” and have been adjudicated elsewhere. The results of national security reviews by other agencies have not been published. However, the Commissioner’s review of the company’s privacy practices is still comprehensive for what was in scope.

TikTok detects and removes about 500,000 accounts of Canadian children under 13 annually. Yet even though the company has dedicated significant engineering efforts to estimating users’ ages for advertising and to produce recommendations, it has not developed similar capabilities for restricting minors’ access.

Despite my skepticism of the Commissioner’s efficacy in cases like these, this investigation produced a number of results. TikTok made several changes as the investigation progressed, including restricting ad targeting to minors:

As an additional measure, in its response to the Offices’ Preliminary Report of Investigation, TikTok committed to limit ad targeting for users under 18 in Canada. TikTok informed the Offices that it implemented this change on April 1st, 2025. As a result, advertisers can no longer deliver targeted ads to users under 18, other than according to generic data (such as language and approximate location).

This is a restriction TikTok has in place for some regions, but not everywhere. It is not unique to TikTok, either; Meta and Google targeted minors, and Meta reportedly guessed teens’ emotional state for ad targeting purposes. This industry cannot police itself. All of these companies say they have rules against ad targeting to children and have done so for years, yet all of them have been found to ignore those rules when they are inconvenient.

Apple Attempts to Rally Users Against E.U. Digital Markets Act ⇥ apple.com

Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — and a handful of other places — but not in Argentina, India, Japan, Mexico, or Singapore. Why this mix? Why did Apple bother to translate it into Thai but not Japanese? It is a fine mystery. Read into it what you will.

Anyway, you will be amazed to know how Apple now views the DMA:

It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.

[…]

That’s why we’re urging regulators to take a closer look at how the law is affecting the EU citizens who use Apple products every day. We believe our users in Europe deserve the best experience on our technology, at the same standard we provide in the rest of the world — and that’s what we’ll keep fighting to deliver.

It thinks the DMA should disappear.

Its reasoning is not great; Michael Tsai read the company’s feature delays more closely and is not convinced. One of the delayed features is Live Translation, about which I wrote:

This is kind of a funny limitation because fully half the languages Live Translation works with — French, German, and Spanish — are the versions spoken in their respective E.U. countries and not, for example, Canadian French or Chilean Spanish. […]

Because of its launch languages, I think Apple expects this holdup will not last for long.

I did not account for a cynical option: Apple is launching with these languages as leverage.

The way I read Apple’s press release is as a fundamental disagreement between the role each party believes it should play, particularly when it comes to user privacy. Apple seems to believe it is its responsibility to implement technical controls to fulfill its definition of privacy and, if that impacts competition and compatibility, too bad. E.U. regulators seem to believe it has policy protections for user privacy, and that users should get to decide how their private data is shared.

Adam Engst, TidBits:

Apple’s claim of “the same standard we provide in the rest of the world” rings somewhat hollow, given that it often adjusts its technology and services to comply with local laws. The company has made significant concessions to operate in China, doesn’t offer FaceTime in the United Arab Emirates, and removes apps from the still-functional Russian App Store at the Russian government’s request. Apple likely pushed back in less public ways in those countries, but in the EU, this public statement appears aimed at rallying its users and influencing the regulatory conversation.

I know what Engst is saying here, and I agree with the sentiment, but this is a bad group of countries to be lumped in together with. That does not mean the DMA is equal to the kinds of policies that restrict services in these other countries. It remains noteworthy how strict Apple is in restricting DMA-mandated features only to countries where they are required, but you can just change your region to work around the UAE FaceTime block.

Australian Opposition Parties Encourage Migration to Forthcoming U.S. Version of TikTok ⇥ skynews.com.au

Oscar Godsell, Sky News:

The opposition’s shadow finance minister James Paterson has since urged the Australian Labor government to follow suit.

Mr Paterson told Sky News if the US was able to create a “safer version” of TikTok, then Australia should liaise with the Trump administration to become part of that solution.

“It would be an unfortunate thing if there was a safe version of TikTok in the United States, but a version of TikTok in Australia which was still controlled by a foreign authoritarian government,” he said.

I am not sure people in Australia are asking for yet more of the country’s media to be under the thumb of Rupert Murdoch. Then again, I also do not think the world needs more social media platforms controlled by the United States, though that is very clearly the wedge the U.S. government is creating: countries can accept the existing version of TikTok, adopt the new U.S.-approved one, or ban them both. The U.S. spinoff does not resolve user privacy problems and it raises new concerns about the goals of its government-friendly ownership and management.

Patreon Will Automatically Enable Audience Irritation Features Next Week ⇥ c.im

Do you manage a Patreon page as a “creator”? I do; it is where you can give me five dollars per month to add to my guilt over not finishing my thoughts about Liquid Glass.1 You do not have to give me five dollars. I feel guilty enough as it is.

Anyway, you might have missed an email Patreon sent today advising you that Autopilot will be switched on beginning October 1 unless you manually turn it off. According to Patreon’s email:

Autopilot is a growth engine that automatically sends your members and potential members strategic, timely offers which encourage them to join, upgrade, or retain your membership — without you having to lift a finger.

As an extremely casual user, I do not love this; I think it is basically spam. I am sympathetic toward those who make their living with Patreon. I turned this off. If you have a Patreon creator page and missed this email, now you know.

And if you are a subscriber to anyone on Patreon and begin receiving begging emails next week, please be gracious. They might not be aware this feature was switched on.

  1. I am most looking forward to reading others’ reviews when I am done, which I have so far avoided so my own piece is not tainted. ↥︎

Setting Up a New Apple TV Is Still Not Good ⇥ sixcolors.com

Tonight, I set up a new Apple TV — well, as “new” as a refurbished 2022-though-still-current-generation model can be — and it was not a good time. I know Apple might be releasing a new model later this year, but any upgrades are probably irrelevant for how I have used my existing ten-year-old model. I do not even have a 4K television.

My older model has some drawbacks. It is pretty slow, and the storage space is pitiful — I think it is the 32 GB model — so it keeps offloading apps. What I wanted to do was get a new one and bump the old Apple TV to my kitchen, where I have a receiver and a set of speakers I have used with Bluetooth, and then I would be able to AirPlay music in all my entertaining spaces. Real simple stuff.

Jason Snell, in a sadly still-relevant Six Colors article:

The setup starts promisingly: You can bring your iPhone near the Apple TV, and it will automatically log your Apple ID in. If you’ve got the One Home Screen feature turned on, all your apps will load and appear in all the right places. It will feel like you’ve done a data transfer.

But it’s all a mirage.

One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests — a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.

I went into this upgrade realizing my wife and I would need to set up all our streaming apps again. (She was cool with it.) That is not great, but at least I had that expectation.

But even the “promising” parts of the setup experience did not work for me. When I brought my iPhone near the new Apple TV, it spun before throwing a mysterious error. After setting it up manually, it thought it was not connected to Wi-Fi — even though it was — and then it tried syncing the home screen. Some of the apps are right, but it has not synced all of them, and none of them are in the correct position.

Then I opened Music on my phone to try and AirPlay to both Apple TVs, only to find it was not listed. It turns out that is a separate step. I had to add it to my Home, which again involved me bringing my iPhone into close proximity and tapping a button. This failed the three times I tried it. So I restarted my Apple TV and my phone, and then Settings told me I needed to complete my Home setup. I guess it worked but somehow did not move to the next step. At last, AirPlay worked — and, frankly, it is pretty great.

I know bugs happen about as often as blog posts complaining about bugs. This thing is basically an appliance, though. I am glad Apple ultimately did not make a car.

U.S. Secret Service Busts Giant SIM Farm in New York ⇥ wired.com

The U.S. Secret Service:

The U.S. Secret Service dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials, which represented an imminent threat to the agency’s protective operations.

This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites.

That sure is a lot of SIM cards, and a scary-sounding mix of words in the press release:

  • “[…] telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials […]”

  • “[…] these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks […]”

  • “These devices were concentrated within 35 miles of the global meeting of the United Nations General Assembly […]”

Reporters pounced. The New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, and even security publications like the Record seized on dramatic statements like those, and another said by the special agent in a video the Service released: “this network had the potential to […] essentially shut down the cellular network in New York City”. Scary stuff.

When I read the early reports, it sure looked to me like some reporters were getting a little over their skis.

For a start, emphasizing the apparent proximity to the U.N. in New York seems to me like a stretch. A thirty-five mile area around the U.N. looks like this — and that is diameter, not radius. If you cannot see that or this third-party website goes away at some point, that is a circle encompassing just about the entire island of Manhattan, going deep into Brooklyn and Queens, stretching all the way up to Chappaqua, and out into Connecticut and New Jersey. That is a massive area. One could just as easily say it was within thirty-five miles of any number of New York-based landmarks and be just as accurate.

Second, the ability to “facilitat[e] anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises” is common to basically any internet-connected device. The scale of this one is notable, but you do not need a hundred-thousand SIM cards to make criminal plans. And the apparent possibility of “shut[ting] down the cellular network in New York” is similarly common to any large-scale installation. This is undeniably peculiar, huge, and it seems to be nefarious, but a lot of this seems to be a red herring.

Andy Greenberg, Lily Hay Newman, and Matt Burgess, Wired:

Despite speculation in some reporting about SIM farm operation that suggests it was created by a foreign state such as Russia or China and used for espionage, it’s far more likely that the operation’s central focus was scams and other profit-motivated forms of cybercrime, says Ben Coon, who leads intelligence at the cybersecurity firm Unit 221b and has carried out multiple investigations into SIM farms. “The disruption of cell services is possible, flooding the network to the degree that it couldn’t take any more traffic,” Coon says. “My gut is telling me there was some type of fraud involved here.”

These reporters point to a CNN article by John Miller and Celina Tebor elaborating on the threat to “senior U.S. government officials”: they were swatting calls targeting various lawmakers. Not nothing and certainly dangerous, but this is not looking anything like how many reporters have described it, nor what the U.S. Secret Service is suggesting through its word choices.