Search Results for: ostensibly

In Its Quarterly Earnings Call, Facebook Discusses the Projected Effects of App Tracking Transparency on iOS ⇥ apnews.com

Although App Tracking Transparency only shipped this week as part of iOS 14.5, Apple announced it last year, and it got Facebook all riled up. The company has aggressively campaigned against the feature, arguing that it will harm small businesses because, as Facebook’s Dan Levy wrote, precisely targeted ads bring businesses’ costs down:

This affects not just app developers, but also small businesses that rely on personalized ads to grow. Here’s why. Small businesses have small budgets. For these small budgets to work, they have to be targeted at the customers that matter to small businesses. It doesn’t do a local wedding planner any good to reach people who aren’t planning a wedding. Likewise, it doesn’t do a small ecommerce outfit selling customized dog leashes any good to reach cat owners. Put simply, by dramatically limiting the effectiveness of personalized advertising, Apple’s policy will make it much harder for small businesses to reach their target audience, which will limit their growth and their ability to compete with big companies.

This line of reasoning was thoroughly debunked by Facebook’s ex-employees and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Andrés Arrieta who pointed out that behaviourally-targeted ads are often more expensive than more weakly-targeted versions because of the many intermediaries taking their cut. These types of ads produce mixed results for advertisers, have little benefit for publishers, are not very well targeted, and require us to sacrifice our privacy with few ways of opting out.

Then, in a Clubhouse chat with Josh Constine last month, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook “may even be in a stronger position” after the introduction of App Tracking Transparency because of Facebook’s uniquely large amount of user data. But that was contradicted somewhat in today’s quarterly earnings report in a comment from CFO David Wehner (emphasis mine):

We expect second quarter 2021 year-over-year total revenue growth to remain stable or modestly accelerate relative to the growth rate in the first quarter of 2021 as we lap slower growth related to the pandemic during the second quarter of 2020. In the third and fourth quarters of 2021, we expect year-over-year total revenue growth rates to significantly decelerate sequentially as we lap periods of increasingly strong growth. We continue to expect increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021 from regulatory and platform changes, notably the recently-launched iOS 14.5 update, which we expect to begin having an impact in the second quarter. This is factored into our outlook.

On the call, Wehner said that the impact would be “manageable” due to the company’s increased investments in e-commerce. How much Facebook’s own revenue will be impacted will, as the company says, be seen later this year. This quarter, however, there are no such worries for Facebook.

Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press:

The company said it earned $9.5 billion, or $3.30 per share, in the January-March period. That’s up 94% from $4.9 billion, or $1.71 per share, a year earlier.

Revenue grew 48% to $26.17 billion from $17.44 billion.

But for the small businesses Facebook ostensibly cares about, things got more expensive:

The average price of ads on Facebook grew 30% from a year earlier, while the number of ads increased by 12%.

Alex Heath of the Information on Twitter:

Takeaway from Facebook earnings:

  • Its pricing power for ads is increasing dramatically as Apple makes cheap ads less efficient

  • The business is becoming more efficient as it grows (43% operating margin!) […]

As is often the case for stories about privacy changes — whether regulatory or at a platform level — much of the coverage about App Tracking Transparency has been centred around its potential effects on the giants of the industry: Amazon, Facebook, and Google. But this may actually have a greater impact on smaller ad tech companies and data brokers. That is fine; I have repeatedly highlighted the surreptitious danger of these companies that are not household names. But Facebook and Google can adapt and avoid major hits to their businesses because they are massive — and they may, as Zuckerberg said, do even better. They are certainly charging more for ads.

That is not to say that we should give up and accept that these businesses destroy our privacy to enrich themselves and their shareholders. If we threw in the towel every time we realized that lawmaking was difficult or that laws would be broken sometimes, we wouldn’t have any laws.

You may have noticed my pivot from Apple’s platform rules to a more regulated approach. That is because I maintain that a legal solution is the only correct one. While I am glad this new control exists in iOS, privacy is not something people should buy. And, pursuant to Facebook’s earnings and forecast, there should not be a benefit from the increased scarcity of data due to better privacy controls.

The New M1-Powered iPad Pro ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

The breakthrough M1 chip takes the industry-leading performance of iPad Pro to an entirely new level. The 8-core CPU design features the world’s fastest CPU cores in low-power silicon — delivering up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than A12Z Bionic. The 8-core GPU is in a class of its own, delivering up to 40 percent faster GPU performance. This combination of CPU and graphics performance on iPad Pro widens its lead as the fastest device of its kind. Powerful custom technologies, including a next-generation 16-core Apple Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor (ISP), a unified, high-bandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, 2x faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity, make iPad Pro more capable than ever. The industry-leading power efficiency of M1 enables all of that amazing performance along with all-day battery life in the thin and light design of iPad Pro.1 Because M1 shares the same fundamental architecture of A-series chips, iPadOS is already optimized to take full advantage of the powerful technologies in M1 to easily handle everything from simple navigation to the most demanding workflows.

An iPad uses what is ostensibly the same processor as half of Apple’s Mac lineup. Impressive. This is the first time Apple has openly acknowledged the iPad’s memory instead of treating it as secret sauce and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is offered in similar configurations as its Mac cousins. Unlike a Mac, you cannot customize the RAM independent of its storage; if you do not want a terabyte of disk space, you will get 8 GB of RAM.

There is a lot to love about these new iPad models, and I am excited to see the display in the 12.9-inch model, even though it increases the price considerably. But this is the part of covering new iPad hardware where I am legally obligated to express that my frustrations remain in its software. I am excited for what WWDC may bring on that front because, much as I want one of these new iPad Pro models, nearly all of the things I wish to change about my base-model years-old iPad are in its operating system.

The Redesigned iMac Comes With an M1 Chip and Is Available in Seven Colours ⇥ apple.com

Let’s start with what we can see, shall we? Not since the iMac G3 of the late 1990s has Apple used such vibrant colours on any Mac, and they look beautiful. The product photography makes the green one look like the original “Bondi Blue” iMac. If I were buying one of these iMacs, that’s the one I’d have. I wish the MacBook Air came in these same colour choices.

The new model has a slimmed-down bezel in white, which is an odd choice. I am curious about what that will look like in person, though I have not been a fan of any of the devices I have used with white bezels. There isn’t a logo anywhere on the front, but it still has a chin because that’s where the computer is.

That chin features a pastel version of the iMac’s colour that is matched in the stand; around the sides and back, it is a richer and more vibrant hue. Don’t worry — there is still a silver model available if you are boring.

I am so happy to see colourful computers again — can you tell?

It is around the back of this iMac where things take a bit of a dive. For a start, it has just two USB 4/Thunderbolt ports; on the higher-end models, there are an extra two USB 3 ports. But that and a headphone jack is all the I/O that you get. That means no USB-A ports, of course, but also not SD card reader, which I use every few days on my own iMac. At least all currently-sold iPhones ship with Lightning cables that have a USB-C connector.

This iMac also has a curious new port around back for power and connectivity. It supports WiFi, of course, but if you want to use a wired connection, the higher-end models include a power brick with a gigabit ethernet port. That means the power supply is no longer built in, which creates some floor clutter, and — most curiously — this connects to the iMac via a single braided cable that attaches magnetically. So all current Apple notebooks have cables that are firmly seated and can cause the computer to go flying if they are tripped over, but one desktop model has a magnetic cable.

Apple is pitching this 24-inch iMac as a replacement for the 21.5-inch model; it has discontinued all but the lowest-end 21.5-inch Intel models, but it has retained the 27-inch models for now. This sets up the possibility for a greater differentiation between Apple’s more consumer-oriented products — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and this iMac — and its higher-end products. This iMac uses ostensibly the same chip as its other own-silicon Mac models — and the new iPad Pro — and is limited to the same storage and memory options. The M1 products that have been released so far have proved to be extraordinarily powerful, but there are plenty of use cases that would benefit from more RAM and more power. That is what we can expect from the big iMac, and the 15-inch and higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro models.

The Trust Gap Between Journalists and Companies Is Widening, as Is the Reporter-Public Relations Gap ⇥ jimprosser.medium.com

Jim Prosser of Edelman:

As I see it, there are three distinct structural shifts happening that both explain and give merit to a shift in emphasis toward businesses using their direct channels instead of relying on media coverage. Collectively, they have some profound implications for companies, communicators, and journalists.

[…]

Put simply, Americans on the whole trust business as an institution more than the press as an institution. That’s not conjecture. It’s backed by data.

[…]

There are far more stories businesses want to tell than there are reporters to tell them. How do we know that? Let’s look at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In 2000, there were about two people working in public relations for every one working reporter in America. By 2019, that spread more than doubled to over five, driven by both an increase in PR jobs and a decrease in reporter jobs. By 2029, BLS projects the spread will keep expanding to over six.

I found this post illuminating and alarming. A collective trust in business marketing — or “storytelling”, as Prosser puts it — over good journalism means that more credence is given to media that has an inherent conflict of interest over that which, ostensibly, does not.

A common retort to this is that media outlets have, for years, degraded their own trust. CNN spends hours a day broadcasting talking head shouting matches; entire books have been dedicated to the inadequacies of the New York Times; Fox News is Fox News. This is not a U.S.-exclusive phenomenon: trust in the media, scientists, and academics has fallen in Canada, too.

But this trust gap is almost inherently unfair. When companies screw up, they barely flinch. Consider that, as of last year, 71% of Americans surveyed have a favourable opinion of Facebook. This is after years of behaviour that should have destroyed its reputation.

Media, on the other hand, operates within far tighter margins of trust. Brooke Gladstone, writing for the New York Times in 2015:

Americans say they want accuracy and impartiality, but the polls suggest that, actually, most of us are seeking affirmation. Americans want the news to be patriotic, which explains the big drop in 2004 when stories abounded about Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 commission’s slam on the government’s handling of terrorism, and the Senate Intelligence Committee finding that the White House “overstated” the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Plus, it was an election year. Trust in news media always dips in election years.

We tend to trust media that reflects our own views, and inherently distrust outlets that do not. Companies are perceived to be more neutral; the view that they are only interested in the bottom line is both cynical and perceived as more trustworthy than journalism. I think this is false, but it is what surveys suggest. Prosser makes several suggestions in this article about how media can improve reader trust — many of which have been made before — but I do not think they will be effective. For example, here’s one idea:

While the means of news distribution have changed starkly over the previous decade, news presentation online remains largely the same: text with occasional links and photos, sometimes video, presented in a format that basically tracks the print experience. There’s a meaningful opportunity here to look at means of presenting stories that reinforce trust: presenting primary source documents in line instead of just writing in reference to them, detailing how a piece was sourced in ways people understand […]

“Present primary sources” sounds like a slam-dunk, right? If a publication has documentation of something and shows it, the story should speak for itself. But this has mixed results. In 2004, records supposedly denigrating George W. Bush’s military service were shown to be created in Microsoft Word because those documents were available. On the other hand, even after a full summary was released by the White House of a call between then-U.S. president Donald Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, less than half of Republicans believed news reports about the substance of the call. I am sure you can find plenty of similar examples from different political parties and orientations; these are my own biases.

One positive note that I found while researching for this: Canadians are more trusting of local media, as are Americans (PDF).

Twitter Accounts Ostensibly Belonging to Amazon Employees Are Promoting the Company as It Faces a Unionization Push ⇥ businessinsider.com

Ben Gilbert, Insider:

“Hey everyone!! This is Yola from Oak4,” an account tied to an employee named Yola said last week. “I just joined a program where I am able to answer any questions, comments or concerns you may have about Amazon. I can’t wait to share what my experience working here has been like for me.”

The account, like several others reviewed by Insider, was started in March 2021. Rather than posting, the accounts focus on responding to people tweeting about the company.

Back in 2018, Amazon admitted to paying a small army of employees to tweet positive things about the company.

Not coincidentally, warehouse workers in Alabama finished voting yesterday on whether they should unionize; the result is expected in the coming days. But it is unclear which, if any, of these accounts are part of an Amazon astroturfing campaign, and which are fraudulent.

Here’s the BBC:

Many of the accounts involved used the handle @AmazonFC followed by a first name.

Amazon has previously used this handle for its so-called Amazon Ambassadors – real employees who are paid by the firm to promote and defend it on Twitter.

[…]

Several of the high-profile accounts have been suspended by Twitter. It told the BBC that Amazon Ambassadors are subject to Twitter’s rules on spam and platform manipulation.

Accounts which impersonate or falsely claim to be affiliated with a company, can be temporarily suspended or removed.

In 2019, Amazon reused some of these Twitter accounts under new names; this time, a bunch of new accounts surfaced with profile pictures cribbed from AI face generators. One of the more notable new accounts was “Darla’s”, as Matt Novak of Gizmodo explains:

Just take a look at the ears and the way the hair falls if you need any evidence that the photo of “Darla” is computer generated.

But photos aside, is Darla possibly real in other ways? Frankly, it’s really hard to tell. Some of the tweets almost seem purposely obtuse in the way that a troll might tweet.

“Amazon is NOT union busting, I can not stress that enough! Amazon is just trying to prevent employees from fraternizing or organizing outside of company-approved channels,” Darla tweeted over the weekend.

If that seems a little too perfect, that’s probably because it is. Aric Toler of Bellingcat spotted that the account was associated with a Gmail address instead of an Amazon one. That was the case for many of these new accounts, as Emanuel Maiberg of Vice says:

@AmazonFCDarla and @AmazonFCLulu are just two of the accounts Twitter suspended yesterday. Another used a photo of a guy from Dude Perfect, the YouTube trickshot guys; it was quickly suspended. Other ambassador accounts that appear to be endorsed and operated by Amazon, are still online, and posting only slightly less deranged content about how much they love working at Amazon. The accounts belonging to Amazon were registered with @amazon.com emails. The accounts we noticed had seemingly AI-generated faces were registered with other emails, or required an email before continuing the account verification process. @AmazonFCDarla and other seemingly fake Amazon ambassador accounts had open direct messages. The official Amazon ambassador accounts did not.

It’s kind of funny that Amazon thought these “ambassador” accounts — there are still some real ones — were a great PR move in the first place. It uses a predictable format and doesn’t control the Twitter namespace, so it is trivial for others to create parody accounts that highlight many of the reasons workers are unionizing. But I am not surprised many people fell for these tweets. Amazon’s PR strategy has been so hostile lately that a member of its security team filed a report speculating that the @AmazonNews account may have been accessed by an unauthorized user.

Regardless, the collapse of context on Twitter makes it easy to create the impression of legitimacy with little work. It sort of feels like screaming into the void to encourage extra vigilance on Twitter, but I think we can all remind ourselves and each other to be more careful about reacting strongly to tweets from new and unfamiliar sources.

Supermicro​fragilistic​expialidocious

It has been two and a half years since Bloomberg Businessweek published the now-legendary story of how servers made by Supermicro were compromised by Chinese intelligence at the time of manufacture — servers that ended up in data centres for “a major bank, government contractors”, Apple, and a company acquired by Amazon that counted among its clients the U.S. Department of Defense. Contemporary statements from the named affected companies were unequivocal: either the reporters were completely wrong, or these statements were lies that would carry severe penalties should evidence be found.

In the ensuing years, Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, the two reporters on the story, have mostly stayed quiet despite frantic calls from security professionals for clarity. Its truthfulness has become something of an obsession for many, including me. On the first anniversary of its publication, I lamented the lack of followup: “either [it is] the greatest information security scoop of the decade or the biggest reporting fuck-up of its type”.

Nearly a year and a half has passed since I wrote that, and it has seemed like it would remain a bizarre stain on Bloomberg Businessweek’s credibility. And then, today, came the followup.

Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, Bloomberg:

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense found thousands of its computer servers sending military network data to China — the result of code hidden in chips that handled the machines’ startup process.

In 2014, Intel Corp. discovered that an elite Chinese hacking group breached its network through a single server that downloaded malware from a supplier’s update site.

And in 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned multiple companies that Chinese operatives had concealed an extra chip loaded with backdoor code in one manufacturer’s servers.

Each of these distinct attacks had two things in common: China and Super Micro Computer Inc., a computer hardware maker in San Jose, California. They shared one other trait; U.S. spymasters discovered the manipulations but kept them largely secret as they tried to counter each one and learn more about China’s capabilities.

When I woke up this morning and saw Techmeme’s rewritten headline, “Sources: US investigators say hardware and firmware of Supermicro servers were tampered, with an extra chip loaded with a backdoor to send data to China”, I thought there must be some strange bug that is loading old news. Alas, this is a new story, with new sources — over fifty people spoke with the reporters, apparently — new evidence, and new allegations. But rather than clarifying the 2018 article, I find that I have many of the same questions now about two blockbuster articles.

Before I get into my confusion, a necessary caveat: I only have information that has been shared publicly and I am a hobbyist commentator, while Robertson and Riley are journalists who have been collecting details for years. These stories matter a lot, and their allegations are profound, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And based on everything that has been reported so far, I just don’t see it yet. Chalk it up to my own confusion and naïveté, but it seems like I am not alone in finding these reports insufficiently compelling.

Here’s the one-paragraph summary: Supermicro is a big company with lots of clients, any of which would be concerned about a backdoor to a foreign intelligence agency in their hardware. According to these reports, the U.S. intelligence apparatus was mobilized to counter the alleged threat. This has been a high-profile case since the first story was published. And I am supposed to believe that, in two and a half years, the only additional reporting that has been done on this story is from the same journalists at the same publication as the original. Why do I not buy that?

Robertson and Riley’s new report concerns the three specific incidents in the quoted portion above. There is no new information about the apparent victims described in their 2018 story. They do not attempt to expand upon stories about what was found on servers belonging to Apple or the Amazon-acquired company Elemental, nor do they retract any of those claims. The new report makes the case that this is a decade-long problem and that, if you believe the 2010, 2014, and 2015 incidents, you can trust those which were described in 2018. But if you don’t trust the 2018 reporting, it is hard to be convinced by this story.

This time around, there are many more sources, some of which agreed to be named. There is still no clear evidence, however. There are no photographs of chips or compromised motherboards. There are no demonstrations of this attack. There is no indication that any of these things were even shown to the reporters. The new incidents are often described by unnamed “former officials”, though there are a handful of people who are willing to have quotes attributed.

So let’s start with the claims of one of those on-the-record sources:

“In early 2018, two security companies that I advise were briefed by the FBI’s counterintelligence division investigating this discovery of added malicious chips on Supermicro’s motherboards,” said Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL who co-founded DataTribe, a venture capital firm. “These two companies were subsequently involved in the government investigation, where they used advanced hardware forensics on the actual tampered Supermicro boards to validate the existence of the added malicious chips.”

Janke, whose firm has incubated startups with former members of the U.S. intelligence community, said the two companies are not allowed to speak publicly about that work but they did share details from their analysis with him. He agreed to discuss their findings generally to raise awareness about the threat of Chinese espionage within technology supply chains.

Do not be distracted by the description of Janke as a former Navy SEAL. It is irrelevant to this matter.

One of the companies that has received funding from DataTribe is Dragos, which promises “industrial strength cybersecurity for industrial infrastructure”. It is not clear whether Dragos was one of the firms that received an FBI briefing. However, Dragos’ CEO Robert M. Lee has been consistently critical of Robertson and Riley’s reporting. Lee continues to be skeptical of their claims, saying that they have “routinely shown they struggle on technical details”. That becomes apparent in a detail in this adjacent story of apparently compromised Lenovo ThinkPads used by U.S. forces in Iraq in 2008:

“A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the U.S. military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China,” Lee Chieffalo, who managed a Marine network operations center near Fallujah, Iraq, testified during that 2010 case. “That was a huge security breach. We don’t have any idea how much data they got, but we had to take all those systems off the network.”

Three former U.S officials confirmed Chieffalo’s description of an added chip on Lenovo motherboards. The episode was a warning to the U.S. government about altered hardware, they said.

That quote was pulled from a court transcript, and Chieffalo really did say “a chip encrypted on the motherboard”. That phrase is gibberish. It seems likely that Chieffalo meant to say “a chip embedded on the motherboard”, but the transcript includes no attempt at correction. More worrying for this story, Chieffalo was quoted wholesale without any note from the reporters. It seems reasonable that they could not speculate about the intended word choice, but surely they could have reached Chieffalo for clarification. If not, it seems like an odd choice to approvingly quote it; it undermines my trust in the writers’ understanding.

That trust is critical, particularly as this report implies a much more severe allegation. In 2018, Robertson and Riley wrote that Supermicro servers were compromised at the subcontractor level:

During the ensuing top-secret probe, which remains open more than three years later, investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.

That suggests some distance between Supermicro itself and its allegedly compromised boards. If this is true, the company has some wiggle room there to disclaim awareness and terminate that supplier relationship. But in today’s report, Robertson and Riley step up the level of Supermicro’s involvement:

Manufacturers like Supermicro typically license most of their BIOS code from third parties. But government experts determined that part of the implant resided in code customized by workers associated with Supermicro, according to six former U.S. officials briefed on the findings.

Investigators examined the BIOS code in Defense Department servers made by other vendors and found no similar issues. And they discovered the same unusual code in Supermicro servers made by different factories at different times, suggesting the implant was introduced in the design phase.

Overall, the findings pointed to infiltration of Supermicro’s BIOS engineering by China’s intelligence agencies, the six officials said.

The report is careful to say that there is no evidence of executive involvement, and that these changes would have been made by people in a position to be working directly with Supermicro’s server technologies. But that still implies knowledge of this alleged compromise at much closer proximity than some factory in China.

The BIOS manipulation above is dated to 2013. The following year, the report says, the FBI detected nefarious chips on “small batches” of Supermicro boards:

Alarmed by the devices’ sophistication, officials opted to warn a small number of potential targets in briefings that identified Supermicro by name. Executives from 10 companies and one large municipal utility told Bloomberg News that they’d received such warnings. While most executives asked not to be named to discuss sensitive cybersecurity matters, some agreed to go on the record.

In 2018, Businessweek said there were up to thirty companies; it is not clear how much overlap there is with the eleven above. But, as Robertson and Riley write, not a single one has said they found evidence of infiltration. Some blamed a dearth of information from the FBI for their inability to find a problem with their servers, but what if the supposed rogue chips simply did not exist? That would make it especially hard to find evidence for them. Just because government agencies are providing briefings of a possible problem, it does not necessarily mean that problem exists as described.

Here’s one more named source with a funny story:

Darren Mott, who oversaw counterintelligence investigations in the bureau’s Huntsville, Alabama, satellite office, said a well-placed FBI colleague described key details about the added chips for him in October 2018.

“What I was told was there was an additional little component on the Supermicro motherboards that was not supposed to be there,” said Mott, who has since retired. He emphasized that the information was shared in an unclassified setting. “The FBI knew the activity was being conducted by China, knew it was concerning, and alerted certain entities about it.”

If there is a phrase that is jumping out to you in this quote, it is probably “October 2018” because that is when Robertson and Riley published their original “Big Hack” piece. It seems completely plausible to me that Mott’s colleague was describing that Businessweek article. There is nothing here that suggests the colleague was referring to independent knowledge. On the contrary, the fact that this was shared in an “unclassified setting” runs counter to the repeated assertions in both articles about the sensitivity and secrecy of these operations — so secret that, apparently, not even Supermicro was supposed to know.

There is one more incident described in detail. This time, Intel was the supposed target in 2014:

Intel’s investigators found that a Supermicro server began communicating with APT 17 shortly after receiving a firmware patch from an update website that Supermicro had set up for customers. The firmware itself hadn’t been tampered with; the malware arrived as part of a ZIP file downloaded directly from the site, according to accounts of Intel’s presentation.

This delivery mechanism is similar to the one used in the recent SolarWinds hack, in which Russians allegedly targeted government agencies and private companies through software updates. But there was a key difference: In Intel’s case, the malware initially turned up in just one of the firm’s thousands of servers — and then in just one other a few months later. Intel’s investigators concluded that the attackers could target specific machines, making detection much less likely. By contrast, malicious code went to as many as 18,000 SolarWinds users.

This posits an incredibly sophisticated attack — but, again, without supporting evidence. The report says that two steel companies based outside of the U.S. received compromised firmware in 2015 and 2018 from that update site. The Bloomberg story does not mention a 2016 case where Apple found an “infected driver” on one of its servers, which it determined to be accidental. All of these cases point back to an update server that Supermicro’s statement implies was not being served over HTTPS — pause for effect — until some time after that 2018 incident. That’s pretty bad security.

But is it possible that these were more isolated events, and not precise attacks? I am not doubting Intel’s investigative competence, but I am questioning whether the details of this internal presentation have been been accurately relayed to Robertson and Riley. There is no indication that the reporters saw the presentation themselves. If you shed the narrative and look at what is being described here, it sounds like APT17 — an infiltration team that FireEye attributes to the Chinese government — might have compromised Supermicro’s update server and planted malware for its clients to inadvertently install. Both Apple and Intel have denied that this was of notable concern. Malware is certainly a worry, though I am having trouble after all this time trusting the reporting I am basing my theory on. But there is a vast chasm between what has become a routine breach of a supplier with high-value clientele, and the supply chain hardware attack that Bloomberg has been reporting for two and a half years now without turning up a single piece of direct evidence.

There is more in Robertson and Riley’s new piece that one can nitpick; Matt Tait put together a comprehensive Twitter thread of concerns, with an acceptable summary:

FWIW, my money is on this whole saga being, if you dig deeply enough, just briefings related to the 2016 supermicro bad firmware update incident filtered through so many games of telephone that it’s eventually twisted itself into a story about tiny chips that never happened.

The problem remains that we just do not know what is going on here. This is not a trivial matter: there are many companies that rely on Supermicro hardware, and they need to know if there is any chance that any of it is compromised. We now have two lengthy and deeply reported stories with ostensibly alarming conclusions that have produced more confusion than clear answers.

A key indicator of the risk seen in these reports is how Supermicro’s clients behaved after these incidents were disclosed. It turns out that many of them — including Intel, the Pentagon, and NASA — have continued to use Supermicro as a supplier. One would think that, if there were concerns about the security of the company’s products, clients would be cancelling contracts left and right.

Everything about this story is wild and hard to believe. Apparently, there were three different vectors of vulnerabilities in Supermicro products: BIOS manipulation, malicious chips, and insecure firmware updates. In Robertson and Riley’s telling, all three have been exploited over the last eleven years. These attacks cover a few dozen high-profile companies and are being investigated by U.S. intelligence agencies; those agencies are briefing other orgnanizations about the danger. Yet there are only two journalists who have heard anything about this, despite this supposed supply chain attack being one of the most-watched information security stories in recent memory, and Supermicro still is not a prohibited vendor.

I would find this more compelling if this story were corroborated by more outlets with different sources, or if Robertson and Riley were able to produce more rigorous evidence. Then, at least, there would be some clarity. Right now, it feels like I’ve seen this movie before.

Apple Tells Parler to Moderate Better or Lose Its App by Tomorrow ⇥ buzzfeednews.com

Ryan Mac and John Paczkowski, Buzzfeed News:

In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer.

“We have received numerous complaints regarding objectionable content in your Parler service, accusations that the Parler app was used to plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 that led (among other things) to loss of life, numerous injuries, and the destruction of property,” Apple wrote to Parler. “The app also appears to continue to be used to plan and facilitate yet further illegal and dangerous activities.”

Apple gave Parler a day from when it sent its letter to submit a new version of the app alongside a moderation policy. Google did not wait; it pulled the app from the Play Store this afternoon.

From Apple’s letter, as quoted in the article:

Your CEO was quoted recently saying “But I don’t feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.” We want to be clear that Parler is in fact responsible for all the user generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users. We won’t distribute apps that present dangerous and harmful content.

For what it is worth, it will still be possible to post to Parler from its website even if these apps are removed. It is not as though Parler does not exist on the iPhone after tomorrow when, inevitably, the ostensibly unmoderated platform fails to produce a tighter moderation strategy.

This clearly relates to questions about whether it is fair that users’ native software choices on the iPhone are limited by Apple’s control over the platform and its only software distribution mechanism. It seems reasonable to me that Apple would choose not to provide a platform for apps that have little to no moderation in place. Both Apple and Google disallowed clients for Gab — Twitter but for explicit Nazis — in their respective stores. Apple rejected the app at submission time, while Google permitted it and then pulled it:

Google explained the removal in an e-mail to Ars. “In order to be on the Play Store, social networking apps need to demonstrate a sufficient level of moderation, including for content that encourages violence and advocates hate against groups of people,” the statement read. “This is a long-standing rule and clearly stated in our developer policies. Developers always have the opportunity to appeal a suspension and may have their apps reinstated if they’ve addressed the policy violations and are compliant with our Developer Program Policies.”

Gab now runs on Mastodon, which is a decentralized standard that allows different communities to moderate posts as they choose. There are many Mastodon clients in the App Store, likely because there is not really a singular Mastodon product as much as there are many posts collected through a standard format.

Objects of Power

You may have heard that, several months ago, Glenn Greenwald was told by a senior editor at the Intercept, a publication he co-founded, to correct some factually-dubious claims in his work. He claimed this amounted to censorship and quit in a huff to start a new column on Substack with maybe a few friends. For months now, he has sent email newsletters to subscribers with a typically fervent and melodramatic flair. Consider this recent piece which posits that:

  1. The outgoing administration was pretty typical for a U.S. presidency, and to imply that it flirted with authoritarian policies is an irresponsible exaggeration.

  2. The real authoritarians are the executive teams of big tech companies and the incoming administration.

Like many of Greenwald’s columns, there are elements of truth to both of these statements, which have been shorn of context then, depending on the point he is attempting to make, either magnified or minimized for full effect.

I promise I won’t get too much into the weeds with my summary of the first half of Greenwald’s essay because it is the second half that interests me more.1 However, to substantiate the first argument, Greenwald says that the president’s rhetoric often did not match the actions of his administration. For example, though the president repeatedly floated the idea of banning followers of the world’s second-largest religion from entering the United States, the eventual policy amounted to banning travellers from some majority Muslim countries. That is certainly not fair, but the Supreme Court upheld the president’s right to control the borders and, to Greenwald, that means the outgoing president did not display any more of an authoritarian streak than his predecessors that did not attempt to ban entire religions:

Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.

It is not “unknowable” whether he had “despotic ambitions” — it is right there in his speeches and actions, however limp, fact-free, and legally-dubious they were. In the paragraph that precedes this, Greenwald brushes aside the multiple lawsuits filed by this president’s failed reelection campaign because they were implausible.2 But they were real lawsuits because the president really does not want to leave this job. He likes power; you can tell by his, as ProPublica put it, “last-minute killing spree”. It is incorrect to call him an authoritarian. But it is completely accurate to say that he moved more explicitly in that direction than previous administrations, and it is only because of activists and journalists like, yes, Greenwald that checks and balances were mobilized to mollify some of the excesses of this administration.

It is also not irrelevant. This administration is a wake-up call to those in the United States and around the world living in what we like to consider stable advanced democracies that there are politicians with similar and greater ambitions of power. Those people are not as unelectable as we would like to believe. It is also a reminder that the press ought to subject the incoming administration to similar scrutiny. McKay Coppins, the Atlantic:

Yamiche Alcindor, a correspondent for PBS NewsHour, told me she hopes her colleagues will retain the lessons they’ve learned from covering Trump. The default skepticism toward government officials, the aversion to euphemism, the refusal to accept approved narratives—to Alcindor, these are features of a healthy press, not signs that something is amiss. She attributes this attitude to her background covering race and policing. “When something is racist, we should just say it’s racist,” she said. “When someone is lying, we should just say they’re lying.” (Trump has repeatedly singled Alcindor out at press conferences, calling her “threatening” and her questions “nasty.”)

It is Greenwald’s second point which is why I felt compelled to write this, though. I have written extensively about the worries I have about monopolistic companies — particularly in tech and tech-adjacent fields like telecommunications, because that is the kind of column this is — and also about platforms’ failed moderation policies. These are inherently related concepts: as platforms become bigger, their small-scale moderation failures also grow; and, as more communications pass through those platforms, any intervention can appear to be censorship, even when it is not:

As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.

In the Rising clip, Greenwald goes further: first, by misrepresenting other reporting about the New York Post story in question, and also by claiming that Facebook and Twitter “censored the internet” because they algorithmically limited the story’s spread or prevented links to it from being posted. I am still uncertain about whether it was a good idea for either company to attempt to restrict the spread of that story. The closest analogy I can think of is when a stock market or a regulatory body suspends trading of a particular company’s shares because of breaking news.

Twitter, in particular, has become more assertive in labelling tweets that have the potential to spread misinformation. Most notably, it has labelled tweets from the president and other elected officials, as a sort of compromise between removing tweets and leaving these statements up to spread with impunity from figures of authority.

These are only symptom of a much wider problem. These platforms are built for engagement and have few controls to counter bad faith exploitation. There are parallels to this in live television coverage of the president’s rallies, which were often broadcast in full between 2015 and throughout his presidency. That meant that the president was free for ninety minutes to present blatant lies with unprecedented volume before a national audience, only to have news anchors struggle to rebut even a fraction of those claims. Print publications were better suited to contextualize the same statements because they are inherently slower. That does not mean they always — or even often — succeeded, however.

This pandemic brought new waves of misinformation that platforms struggled to control. It is one thing if it is about an election in one country; the stakes are much higher when public health is at risk. Taking a hands-off approach would be a callous display of irresponsibility.3 In a situation that requires nuanced expertise, there is not an open marketplace of ideas for everyone to participate in. Subject matter experts may get things wrong, but it is not because they lack fundamental knowledge. One person’s lightly-informed speculation is not a valid counterargument to an expert’s advice.

The biggest platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube — have engaged in more public moderation of users’ posts this year than at any time before. The executives of these companies are able to influence which posts are promoted and which are demoted. But, contrary to Greenwald’s assertion, none of this can reasonably be called “censorship”, and it is a wild stretch to call executives “authoritarian” and equate it with the behaviour of governments. You may not have been able to share that Hunter Biden story in the New York Post for a few hours, but the Post still has one of the highest circulations of any newspaper in the English-speaking world. Your cousin’s tweet linking this pandemic to, of all things, cellphone towers may have a fact-checking label appended, but they can still post about it. And it seems that this more careful approach to moderation might improve the competitiveness of the social networking space as users flock to ostensibly “unmoderated” platforms — which, in turn, will step up their moderation efforts, just differently. Ironically, these concerns about platform “censorship” are instead creating more options for hosting and sharing. I welcome the narrowing focus of what is allowed on the biggest platforms to lessen their powerful catch-all nature.

But it also has the side effect of putting big public companies between users and the publication of their thoughts, appointing themselves as ultimate arbiters of what they want to see on their platforms. That is difficult and something they will get wrong from time to time, but it is also their prerogative, and it is not as though there are no alternative avenues for publishing. There are other social networks that are vastly smaller, and there are few obstacles to self-publishing. Greenwald writes on Substack, for example, which is an all-in-one product for getting text and images to people; my own website requires moderately more configuration, but I have more control than Greenwald. These alternatives are not as popular and require more promotion, often using bigger platforms. Still, none of this amounts to censorship.

As I have written before, I think the world would, in very general terms, be better served by smaller and more specialized companies. It is completely reasonable to be skeptical of the control held by conglomerates like Google — and Comcast, for that matter. But calling them and the incoming administration “authoritarian”, as Greenwald does in the closing paragraphs of this piece, is a ridiculous assertion, as much if not more so than the flirtations with fascist aspirations of the outgoing administration that Greenwald is so quick to wave away. There are many reasons to wish for greater intervention to reduce monopolization and concentration of power. But it is patently untrue that free expression is somehow more limited for Americans now than it was last year or ten years ago, and the most concerning threat to that has bipartisan support.

What I find so frustrating about this piece is that there is so much I would agree with in Greenwald’s article, if only the histrionics were dialled back by about fifty percent. A similar if more sober observation about these platforms’ gatekeeping characteristics was published by Ben Smith in the New York Times earlier this year. Among this pandemic’s more concerning long-term qualities is how much it increased dependence on big companies — partly because of the economies of scale, partly because of their supply chains, and partly because a large store operating at reduced capacity is still a large store that can fit many people. Working from home also means increased dependency on big communications companies. The outgoing U.S. administration tested the limits of existing powers already held by government. But Greenwald’s obsession with being a permanent contrarian obscures these quite reasonable points with alarmism and misdirection.

  1. My head throbs when I read Greenwald’s screeds, even when our opinions overlap. For what it is worth, there is much to like about the substance of this piece. I only wish Greenwald employed the services of an editor. And, yes, I recognize the irony. ↥︎

  2. Greenwald:

    The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.

    One could point out that it is “hope masquerading as concern” and “exciting and self-glorifying” to find an excuse to leave a publication one co-founded because an editor wanted to stick to fact-based analysis instead of extending ultraprocessed grains of truth, only to begin a paid Substack newsletter gig that, by one’s own admission, was already in the works:

    Prior to the extraordinary experience of being censored this week by my own news outlet, I had already been exploring the possibility of creating a new media outlet. I have spent a couple of months in active discussions with some of the most interesting, independent and vibrant journalists, writers and commentators across the political spectrum about the feasibility of securing financing for a new outlet that would be designed to combat these trends.

    But, sure, let’s call it “censorship”. ↥︎

  3. One of the examples Greenwald gives to minimize the president’s authoritarian tendencies was his delayed use of the Defense Production Act to redirect American manufacturing efforts for pandemic-related issues — if he really did have dictatorial aspirations, he would surely jump on that opportunity like a kid in a bouncy castle. Greenwald reframes this one instance where there was bipartisan pleading for the president to be more authoritarian and his refusal to take control over a serious situation as reason to believe he’s just like any other president which, you know, fine.

    But this is a big problem with Greenwald’s simplified use of words like “censor” and “authoritarian”. In the case of a pandemic, we need expert figures that we can trust. You can superficially frame this as becoming “more authoritarian”, but a public health crisis is one instance where there must be candid and unified explanations of risk, prevention methods, and plans — especially since all of those things will change over time with new information.

    This is one thing Greenwald gets absolutely right in his interview on Rising: popular media botched explanations for why political rallies were being cancelled and people were being encouraged to stay away from religious gatherings, yet participation in this summer’s widespread protests against systemic racial injustice was not acknowledged by some of the same outlets as a public health concern. There are, it turns out, key differences between rallies and marched protests that explain why many of the former have been considered “super spreader” events but not the latter, as Lawrence Wright writes in the overwhelming single-essay latest issue of the New Yorker:

    Surprisingly, the marches did not appear to be significant drivers of transmission. “We tested thousands of people,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota, said. “We saw no appreciable impact.” One study found lower rates of infection among marchers than in their surrounding communities. Epidemiologists concluded that mask wearing and being outdoors protected the protesters. Moreover, demonstrators were on the move. Osterholm said that people in stationary crowds are more likely to become infected. In other words, joining a protest march is inherently less dangerous than attending a political rally.

    This makes sense, and many of these facts were known at the time, but there was a lacking public dialogue to explain the difference between all of these things. Trusted figures of authority sure would have been helpful.

    Maybe what I meant by “not getting into the weeds” is that the weeds would be entirely in footnotes. ↥︎

Parler, an Ostensibly Libertarian Twitter-Like Website, Is Funded by Rebekah Mercer ⇥ wsj.com

Jeff Horwitz and Keach Hagey, Wall Street Journal:

As Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have taken a more assertive role in curbing content on their platforms, prominent conservatives on both platforms have responded with a frequent retort: Follow me on Parler.

Launched in 2018, the libertarian-leaning social network was the most downloaded app on both Android and Apple devices for most of last week, according to data from Google and analytics firm App Annie. Its leaders envision it as a free-speech-focused alternative to the giants of Silicon Valley.

The platform also has some deep-pocketed investors. Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund investor Robert Mercer, is among the company’s financial backers, according to people familiar with the matter. The Mercers have previously financed a number of conservative causes.

Mercer and Parler co-founder John Matze confirmed Mercer’s involvement. The Mercer family are mega-donors to Republican causes, though they often describe themselves as “libertarian”, according to a 2017 profile by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. According to Mercer, Rebekah’s father, Robert, made his money running a hedge fund, and has used those earnings to fund Breitbart, effectively invented the Islamophobic “Ground Zero Mosque” myth, and thinks the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “major mistake”.

They are not good people, is all I am saying.

Let’s get back to Parler, a website that Horwitz and Hagey describe in charitable terms. For example, they compare it to Twitter and Facebook’s personalized timelines based on user activity (emphasis mine):

Parler doesn’t do that. The platform doesn’t use content-recommendation algorithms, collects almost no data about its users and, for privacy reasons, hasn’t provided the tools to let users easily cross-post from other platforms. Parler simply shows users all the posts from everyone they follow, in reverse chronological order.

I tried registering for new accounts on Twitter and Parler. On Twitter, you can choose whether to use an email address or a phone number; when you register for Parler, you must provide both. If this is an anti-spam measure, it hasn’t worked. Parler suggests several popular hashtags to look at; one is #parler, naturally, and every post is currently either a sketchy ad for nude photos on Blogspot, or promoting pills that are “better than cocaine”.

Verification on Parler is open to everyone, but you need to submit a scan of either your driver’s license or your passport. You can also give them your Social Security Number. And, yes, Parler extensively tracks your use of its website and app. While it may not track you across the web like Facebook, it is not accurate to claim that it “collects almost no [user] data”.

Or how about this?

While Parler’s terms of service allow the app to tailor content for its users in the future, executives said they were committed to their libertarian principles.

“We’re choosing to be a neutral platform,” said Jeffrey Wernick, the company’s chief operating officer.

When this ostensibly neutral platform had its first wave of popularity in June, it rapidly banned dozens of users who apparently did not align with Parler’s definition of “free speech”, including Ed Bott for posting only “let’s see how long it takes the shitheels running this toilet to kick me out”. It took less than one day. It also banned Devin Nunes’ Cow.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

As we said, they’ve sort of speed-run the content moderation learning curve that every website goes through when they claim to support free speech. They insist they’ll allow anything. Then they start banning spammers. Then trolls. And, that’s the same damn thing Twitter does, and even here they’re admitting that they’re banning “leftist trolls.” In fact, over the past week or so we keep having people showing up on our article from the summer about Parler banning users it doesn’t like and screaming at us about how it’s okay because they’re just banning trolls. But, that’s the point. That’s what Twitter is doing too. Except that Twitter isn’t complaining about ideological trolls.

It’s only Parler that seems to be staking out an ideological claim, trying to ban “leftist” trolls after being cofounded by one of the most extreme partisans around, who laughably claims that Parler will be neutral.

Platforms have wide freedoms to pick and choose what users and posts they permit or deny. That is fine; community management and moderation are necessary attributes of any platform. But only Parler is pretending that it is a bastion of free expression and user privacy, and the Journal ate it up.

First M1 Benchmarks ⇥ macrumors.com

Yesterday, in my summary of Apple’s first own-designed Mac processors, I wrote:

Despite the M1 being an apparently entry-level configuration, Apple is promoting big performance gains. Graphics on the MacBook Air, it says, are up to five times faster than the highest-specced Intel model; on the MacBook Pro page, it says that machine learning performance is eleven times faster. Those are big leaps for complex tasks, but we’ve been down this road before. The Intel iMac was said to be two to three times faster than the PowerPC model it replaced, while the first MacBook Pro was apparently four to five times faster. Those tests were conducted using benchmarking tools, while the comparisons this year are being made using real-world tasks. All of this is to say that we can’t know just yet how fast these new Macs are. Even though they are not Apple’s most performative products, could they perhaps out-perform their Intel-based cousins? Or are they modest updates that help guide users and first- and third-party developers onto a new platform?

It appears that, today, we have an answer.

Juli Clover, MacRumors (emphasis in the original and very appropriate):

The M1 chip, which belongs to a MacBook Air with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

[…]

In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

Benchmarks for the two other M1 models have also appeared on Geekbench and show similar performance. Again, I will stress that testing does not necessarily translate directly to real-world performance, but it certainly seems like the ostensibly lowest-end Macs you can buy are outperformed only by the highest-end desktop Mac configurations and only in multicore tasks.

And, apparently, the two notebooks also get about one-and-a-half to two times the battery life of their Intel-based predecessors. Oh, and the MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan.

I was prepared for big gains, but I am stunned by these results.

Regarding That FT Report About Apple’s Search Engine Ambitions

Yesterday, Tim Bradshaw and Patrick McGee of the Financial Times reported that Apple is ostensibly building a rival to Google’s search engine. You can find a syndicated copy of the article at Ars Technica. It left me scratching my head because it undermines its premise on two fronts: it seems to claim that Apple is surely building a true rival to Google’s search engine, and that Apple does not already have a search engine. The first claim does not seem to be substantiated, and the second seems to be contradicted by the article’s own reporting.

Let’s start with the headline:

Apple Develops Alternative to Google Search

“Develops” is a curious and ambiguous choice of word. It leaves the impression that Apple is either currently working on a true Google Search competitor, or that it has already built one. I am not sure which is the case; let’s find out. Here’s the lede:

Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes to secure prime placement of its engine on the iPhone.

That indicates, to me, that this search engine is something new or more directly opposing Google’s efforts. But it is followed by this paragraph:

In a little-noticed change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has begun to show its own search results and link directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen.

This seems to refer to Siri web suggestions that used to only display within the Safari address bar but are now in Spotlight. As far as I can tell, these are exactly the same suggestions but surfaced in a different place.

There are also keyword search suggestions in Spotlight. But tapping on any of those will boot you into the search engine of your choice — whichever you set in Safari preferences.

Both certainly point to Apple shipping a search engine today. It may not be a website with a list of links based on a query, but Google’s search engine is increasingly unlike that, too. So I am left with the impression that this is a service that currently exists, but then the article posits that it is merely a warm-up act:

That web search capability marks an important advance in Apple’s in-house development and could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, according to several people in the industry.

Here is where things become more speculative. Bradshaw and McGee make no reference to having any sources at Apple, only quotes from a handful of people in adjacent businesses. Maybe they have background information from people who are familiar with Apple’s efforts, but nothing is cited in this article. The claim that Apple is, perhaps, working on a direct competitor to Google’s web search engine appears to be nothing more than speculation about what Apple could do from people who believe that it is something Apple is doing. That position seems to be predicated on regulatory pressures and recent hires:

Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google’s head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world’s most popular search engine.

[…]

“They [Apple] have a credible team that I think has the experience and the depth, if they wanted to, to build a more general search engine,” said Bill Coughran, Google’s former engineering chief, who is now a partner at Silicon Valley investor Sequoia Capital.

Apple’s interest in a search engine seems to be a regular rumour, but now that its contract with Google is attracting attention in the United States and United Kingdom, perhaps there is more substance this time around than in previous years. That raises more questions for me from an antitrust perspective: for example, would regulators who questioned the prominence of Siri on Apple’s devices find it equally dubious for the company to have its own search engine presumably set as the default?

Whatever the case, I am not sure this Financial Times piece sheds light on Apple’s path forward. The only substantive fact in this article is that Apple has expanded Safari’s Siri suggestions to Spotlight. Everything else appears to be speculative.

FCC Chair Ajit Pai Engages in Some Meaningless CDA Section 230 Bootlicking ⇥ arstechnica.com

Bear with me because this gets into the weeds a bit before you’ll get to the headline topic. Skip to the block quotes if you are already caught up on your Fox News shibboleths.

Yesterday, the New York Post published an extremely suspect story about alleged impropriety by Joe Biden and his son Hunter while the latter was working for Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company — something all parties deny. This is something the Republican Party has been desperate to create a scandal from despite their own investigation finding no misconduct by either Biden. The Post sourced its claims, via Rudy Giuliani, from emails and photos ostensibly taken from a laptop Hunter had taken in for service. Then, several hours after the Post published its story, Facebook decided to limit its spread, while Twitter opted to block links to it. And now it has become a whole thing.

There are many interesting questions that we can probe in the meta-story around this article. For example, the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had concerns that hacked emails from Burisma would be combined with forged or edited ones — a tactic Russian intelligence has used before. The Washington Post reports that Giuliani was a target for spreading false information. There is evidence that the Post’s story is based on false information designed to sway the U.S. election in a manner reminiscent of other Russian disinformation campaigns. In fact, this whole saga is awfully familiar: leaked emails, Russian hacking. Didn’t we already do this? I want to bash my head into my desk.

The difference this time around is that Facebook and Twitter are intervening to slow the story’s spread. Is that right? If this is, indeed, an attempt at interference in the election, you may argue that this is a good thing — or is, at least, understandable. It is an unusually strong stance from Facebook and Twitter on a specific story. That has made it a rough day or two from a public relations perspective, as some people see it as censorship or tilting the scales. But one thing is for sure: it is completely legal. And members of the Republican party desperately want to change that.

Siobhan Hughes, Wall Street Journal:

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to issue a subpoena on Tuesday to Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey after the social-media company blocked a pair of New York Post articles that made new allegations about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which his campaign has denied.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is backing President Donald Trump’s proposal to limit legal protections for social media websites that block or modify content posted by users. Pai’s views on the matter were unknown until today when he issued a statement saying that he will open a rule-making process to clarify that the First Amendment does not give social media companies “special immunity.”

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

For years, FCC Chair Ajit Pai has insisted that the thing that was most important to him was to have a “light touch” regulatory regime regarding the internet. He insisted that net neutrality (which put in place a few limited rules to make sure internet access was fair) was clearly a bridge too far, and had to be wiped out or it would destroy investment into internet infrastructure (he was wrong about that). But now that Section 230 is under attack, he’s apparently done a complete reversal. He is now happy to open a proceeding to reinterpret Section 230 to place a regulatory burden on the internet. This is because Ajit Pai is a hypocrite with no backbone, and no willingness to stand up to a grandstanding President.

[…]

Pai is wrong in almost everything he says above. The FCC has no jurisdiction over internet websites. Previous lawsuits have already held that. Furthermore, the FCC has no jurisdiction over Section 230, which was explicitly written to deny the FCC any authority over websites. The FCC has no power to reinterpret the law.

If you think Facebook or Twitter ought not to have moderated the New York Post story, that is a fair point of view. If, however, you believe their moderation decision should be illegal, the problem you have is not with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it is with the First Amendment.

Years of U.S. case law have upheld that businesses are free to deny service to whomever they choose, with exceptions made for cases of discrimination. Twitter has no obligation to host links to that Post story any more than it has an obligation to host spam or your account.

Perhaps your dispute with this action is that heavy-handed moderation by large social media companies is effectively a tool of silencing and censorship. But I would strongly disagree with that: the Post is widely circulated, there are many other venues online, and it is still possible to discuss it on Facebook and Twitter without linking to it. But even if that were true, your problem would be with the scale of both companies, not with Section 230 as written or interpreted.

Nothing about these moderation decisions have anything to do with CDA Section 230. Promises to investigate Facebook and Twitter because they made it harder to spread a link are a gigantic waste of time. It is perhaps worth discussing ways in which Section 230 can be clarified or reworked, but it is not something Pai or the FCC has any control over, nor is it relevant to anything these ostensibly light-regulation “small government” conservatives want to achieve.

This is all so very stupid.

Assorted Thoughts on the Big Antitrust Report ⇥ arstechnica.com

I have now read the antitrust report about one-and-a-half times and I can confidently say that you, reader, are better served by the analysis of others. I do not think a long piece from me, a non-lawyer, trying to interpret its various nooks and crannies is helpful. So, what I can do is point you to a few smart people who wrote about it, and also add a few idle observations of my own.

I think Wednesday’s episode of Dithering offers a great high-level take. I was stunned by the million-plus documents Google produced which, as John Gruber and Ben Thompson point out, appears to be an attempt at overwhelming investigators instead of being helpful.

But I take issue with both hosts’ interpretation of the CEO’s questioning in July and the resulting lack of surprise in this report. They portray this as begging the question in the classic rhetorical sense of deriving a question from a presumed answer or position. What I saw were representatives testing a thesis: the CEOs they were questioning represent tech companies that have become very powerful, potentially through illegal means.

If you have a Dithering subscription and haven’t listened to Wednesday’s episode yet, it’s worth your while.

Kate Cox, Ars Technica:

Facebook outright “has monopoly power in the market for social networking,” the report concludes, and that power is “firmly entrenched and unlikely to be eroded by competitive pressure” from anyone at all due to “high entry barriers—including strong network effects, high switching costs, and Facebook’s significant data advantage—that discourage direct competition by other firms to offer new products and services.”

[…]

But regulators did not block Facebook’s blockbuster acquisitions of either Instagram or WhatsApp, and they didn’t stop 60 other Facebook acquisitions. This led to what one former employee described to the committee as collusion between the platforms, “but with an internal monopoly.” The employee added: “If you own two social media utilities, they should not be allowed to shore each other up. It’s unclear to me why this should not be illegal. You can collude by acquiring competitors and forbidding competition.”

The report attempts to distinguish between social media platforms and social networks. TikTok, it points out, is often cited as a knee-jerk counterpoint to the argument that it is hard to succeed against Facebook’s acquisition strategy. But, it says, TikTok is more like YouTube than Facebook or Instagram.

One thing that struck me as I read the report is how many acquisitions were involved in making all four companies as dominant as they have become. Acquisitions are a clear focus of the investigation; the last forty-odd pages of the report is simply a list of every significant acquisition made by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Some of these companies would likely have disappeared and taken their technologies with them had they not been acquired, but others may have competed against tech giants or offered complementary products while remaining independent. It is impossible to know for sure. But acquisition-driven strategies have arguably created a market where it is increasingly difficult for anyone to even try. Success seems less determined by how well-used a product or service is, and more by which company will acquire it and for what price.

Cox:

Google’s position as the dominant search engine is well-cemented. But over the past 20 years, the company has shifted its behavior “to rank search results based on what is best for Google, rather than what is best for search users,” the report concludes, “be it preferencing its own vertical sites or allocating more space for ads.”

I am encouraged to see the report portray AMP as a technology hostile to competition and the web as a whole.

The report also raises concerns with all four companies about user privacy. Apple’s marketing focus on privacy was also questioned with regard to its ability to limit competition ostensibly on those grounds. I think the report was generally fair in its worry about the implications of having a few companies stewards by default of so much sensitive data. But though there are many recommendations in favour of limiting market dominance, I saw none for regulating the collection and use of private user data. Of course, this was a report about antitrust and anti-competitive practices; but, it seems like the committee only told half the story without recommending strong rules on user privacy.

Casey Newton, writing for his brand new newsletter Platformer:

On the other hand, even these recommendations aren’t likely to become law any time soon. America’s divided Congress has been defined by inaction this year; it is currently failing to provide basic economic relief to tens of millions of Americans during a historic pandemic. And we expect these lawmakers to pass a thoughtful collection of reforms and get the president to sign it?

In fairness, the committee has been clear that nothing will pass this year. For anything to pass at all, Democrats may have to take back the presidency and the Senate, and make it through what promises to be a chaotic and even dangerous transfer of power. Until and unless that happens, the status quo seems likely to endure.

This report is comprehensive. Returning to the Dithering episode, it is true that I found few surprises when I read it. Yet, it is worthwhile to compile all of these questionable practices into a single document. It drops like an anvil — both because of its volume and the impact of seeing these practices laid bare in such clarity. I hope it does more than gather dust. These companies are wildly powerful. Whether you believe that power should be cut down or simply be subject to greater responsibility and oversight, you will find sensible arguments in this report.

But I am not a lawyer.

Quarterly Earnings Announcements From All Four Tech Companies Represented at Wednesday’s Antitrust Hearing ⇥ cnbc.com

Apple PR:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2020 third quarter ended June 27, 2020. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $59.7 billion, an increase of 11 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.58, up 18 percent. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Ina Fried, Axios:

In a conference call following blowout earnings, CFO Luca Maestri said that supply of the new iPhones will come “a few weeks later” than last year, when the new models went on sale in late September.

Mark Gurman on Twitter:

Cook also said that the pandemic likely hurt iPhone and wearables sales, but boosted iPad and Mac purchases. Also said AppleCare and ads were impacted, but said they made record revenue for the App Store, Apple Music, video and cloud services.

Jason Snell notes that this is a record-breaking third quarter. I bet Tim Cook is relieved these results were not yet public during yesterday’s hearing, when big tech companies were accused of profiteering during the pandemic.

Emily McCormick, Yahoo:

Facebook reported second-quarter results that handily topped estimates, growing its user base and advertising business further even during the pandemic and as the social media giant came under increased scrutiny for its policies around policing harmful content on its platforms.

Shares of Facebook rose 5% in late trading to $246.83, as of 4:09 p.m. ET following results.

Casey Newton, the Verge:

The surge in Facebook usage during early shelter-in-place orders in the United States was not just a blip. Daily users of Facebook increased 12 percent year over year, to 1.79 billion. Monthly usage across its family of apps, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, rose 14 percent, to 3.14 billion. And Facebook’s mostly ad-based based business rose along with them: the company’s revenue was up 11 percent year over year, to $18.69 billion.

It’s not just the uncertainty of the markets right now — Facebook was also ostensibly the target of an advertiser boycott. It didn’t appear to have much impact. I bet Mark Zuckerberg is relieved these results were not yet public during yesterday’s hearing, when big tech companies were accused of profiteering during the pandemic.

Annie Palmer, CNBC:

Amazon reported blowout second-quarter results on Thursday, including a huge beat on the top line and double-digit revenue growth year-over-year, helped by surging sales amid the coronavirus pandemic. The stock climbed about 5.3% after hours.

[…]

Third-party sales grew 52% year-over-year during the quarter, outpacing growth in Amazon’s first-party sales, which increased 48% year-over-year.

I bet Jeff Bezos is relieved these results were not yet public during yesterday’s hearing, when big tech companies were accused of profiteering during the pandemic.

Jennifer Elias, CNBC:

Google parent-company Alphabet beat expectations for its second quarter earnings Thursday, but marked its first revenue decline in company history as the coronavirus pandemic slowed economic growth and advertisers pulled back spending during the quarter. The company’s stock barely moved after hours.

Natalie Gagliordi, ZDNet:

Strong growth in Google’s cloud business helped buoy an otherwise challenging quarter for Alphabet, as ad revenues across Search and YouTube struggle to rebound to pre-pandemic levels.

I bet Sundar Pichai is relieved yadda yadda.

The reality is that all four of these companies are infrastructural elements of working from home — even Facebook, which provides messaging services, can be considered essential. As far as I know, none of them deliberately increased prices to reflect higher demand. Some products did see a jump on Amazon, but that was the result of gougers exploiting the platform combined with the company’s dynamic pricing; Amazon said it was trying to combat gouging. But that’s a side-effect of already-established pricing mechanisms, not an indication that Amazon was taking advantage of a pandemic.

That’s not to say that these companies are benevolent. Whether they kept prices the same out of ethical obligation or simply because it would be a public relations nightmare is up to the whims of your particular brand of cynicism. Maybe it’s a little of both. In a tumultuous economy and with record unemployment in the United States, it sure is hard to look at these numbers and see them as something to celebrate, per se. These earnings are a reflection of the outsized role played by all four companies — and Microsoft, which announced strong growth last week. Tech companies don’t need to engage in profiteering when they are already so dominant.

Big Tech’s Power Comes Under Fire at Congressional Antitrust Hearing

Ryan Tracy, Wall Street Journal:

The chief executives of Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google faced relentless criticism at a congressional hearing Wednesday, with Democrats and Republicans alike challenging their business practices.

[…]

The hearing was marked by lawmakers interrupting witnesses before they finished their responses. Mr. Bezos’ video feed went out early in the session, causing Mr. Cicilline to call a recess. At the outset, instead of asking the witnesses to stand and swear to tell the truth, Mr. Cicilline had a different request: “Unmute your microphones and raise your right hands.”

This was ostensibly a hearing about antitrust violations and anti-competitive behaviour, but Republicans by and large used it as an opportunity to accuse Google and Facebook, primarily, of being biased against American conservatives. For example, here’s Florida man Greg Steube recapping some of his questioning on Twitter:

When I confronted Google’s CEO about conservative censorship, he dodged the question.

His company allows videos of violence but blocks videos of medical doctors discussing a medication to treat COVID-19. We need answers and accountability.

It is a symptom of a jaundiced political environment that medical efficacy is being used by people like Rep. Steube as a wedge in his culture war conspiracy theories. It is also completely bananas that he equates minimizing harm from the spread of unproven coronavirus miracle cures with silencing conservative voices.

Rene Ritchie:

At what point does it sink in for Zuckerberg and Pachai that the anti-trust hearings — and fates of their companies — now rest, in part, with people their own algorithms, in part, helped indoctrinate into the cockamamie conspiracy theories now being weaponized against them?

Axios reporter Sara Fischer:

Tech execs always get a free pass from being pressed on serious, substantive issues when they go to The Hill because conservatives, who should care deeply about fair competition, are too distracted by unproven allegations of political censorship.

My problem is not with conservatism more generally, or even necessarily Republicans. It is with a handful of morons — Rep. Steube, Rep. Jordan, Rep. Gaetz, and Rep. Sensenbrenner — who wasted their entire questioning by soapboxing these plainly false theories. A useful public service would be to create a copy of this hearing without their bad faith questioning and, in Rep. Jordan’s case, frequent interruptions. Their presence was an embarrassment that only served to feed the most cynical of people who believe that regulation is inherently bad.

Happily, most of the Democrats on the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee stayed on topic and repeatedly dug into these companies’ business models, acquisition strategies, and anticompetitive practices. The Verge apparently received under embargo internal Facebook emails discussing a potential acquisition of Instagram. The story, by Casey Newton and Nilay Patel, was published concurrent with Rep. Nadler’s questioning:

It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effect around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”

Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”

Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.

“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.

Nice save.

Tim Cook’s opening remarks, meanwhile, stuck to Apple’s current antitrust messaging, flaws and all. Rob Pegoraro, Forbes:

Cook has a stronger case with mobile apps. Installing apps on early handheld organizers was not so easy, requiring a download to a computer and then a transfer to the gadget. But by the mid 2000s, Palm OS handhelds and smartphones hosted a thriving market for third-party software.

Apple first ignored that precedent: A year before the iOS App Store’s debut, Steve Jobs told developers to content themselves with shipping web apps for the iPhone.

“The App Store certainly added efficiency and greater breadth, which I wouldn’t argue with—but that’s a function of improving technology,” emailed Mark Vena, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy (his firm also posts on Forbes).

The App Store’s exclusivity over native iOS app distribution rarely came up during today’s hearing, and Cook deftly sidestepped questions about Apple’s control over the market. At one point, when asked about control, he noted that Apple does not control web apps. That’s entirely true, but I cannot recall anyone pressing Cook on whether that’s a fair comparison. Web apps and native apps do not have all of the same capabilities,1 and there is no other avenue by which native apps may be installed on the most popular smartphone model in the United States, the most popular tablet in the United States, the most popular watch in the United States, or an Apple TV.

I wish it were not so easy for Cook to deflect.

Peter Kafka of Vox nailed it before the hearing began:

Some of you already know that congressional hearings are just that — a chance to hear from citizens and government officials. At a minimum, they are a place to get public answers on the record, like the grilling US Attorney General William Barr received from the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday over everything from his handling of the Mueller investigation to his use of federal troops to quell protests in Washington, DC, and Portland, Oregon.

And sometimes, like in Wednesday’s case, they can also be high-profile bits of theater.

Aside from the theatre, gotcha moments, and wild conspiracy theories, what this hearing demonstrated is that insipid antitrust enforcement has failed the American consumer for decades. I’m Canadian — the biggest tech companies in the world are mostly American, but I feel the side effects of a lack of regulatory responsibility.

  1. I have previously argued that this is a good thing, and I stand by that. ↥︎

Seven No-Logging VPN Providers Publicly Exposed Over a Terabyte of Logs ⇥ theregister.com

Shaun Nichols, the Register:

A string of “zero logging” VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.

This data, we are told, included in at least some cases clear-text passwords, personal information, and lists of websites visited, all for anyone to stumble upon.

It all came to light this week after Comparitech’s Bob Diachenko spotted 894GB of records in an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster that belonged to UFO VPN.

An un-bylined report from vpnMentor dug deeper:

The vpnMentor research team, led by Noam Rotem, uncovered the server and found Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data for potentially over 20 million VPN users, according to claims of user numbers made by the VPNs.

Each of these VPNs claims that their services are “no-log” VPNs, which means that they don’t record any user activity on their respective apps. However, we found multiple instances of internet activity logs on their shared server. This was in addition to the PII data, which included email addresses, clear text passwords, IP addresses, home addresses, phone models, device ID, and other technical details.

The VPNs affected are UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN – all of which appear to be connected by a common app developer and white-labeled for other companies.

Let’s set aside the logging story for now — Dreamfii HK, the creator of all of these VPN services, denies that the logs are exactly as described and claims that their presence does not undermine its claim that these services do not log users’ activity. I want to focus on this business of white labelling, as it is rampant in the VPN world.

There are so many companies that promote VPN reselling as a get-rich-quick business that it makes it hard to trust any provider. NordVPN, for example, is a well-regarded service that resells its infrastructure to many other brands — BullGuard is one such customer, according to Trusted Reviews, but I cannot find any acknowledgement of this arrangement other than a 2018 press release. There is no instance that I can see of NordVPN in BullGuard’s marketing materials and other customer-facing pages.

In a June report, Katie Kasunic of vpnMentor found seven companies that own dozens of VPNs between them, usually only acknowledging their ties in legal documents or press releases. However, Kasunic does not state anywhere that NordVPN offers its own white label service, even as vpnMentor heavily promotes and recommends it.

This kind of reminds me of the food supply chain. I don’t know if you’ve ever flipped through the recalls issued by Health Canada, the FDA, or your local equivalent, but it’s an educational experience. You’ll often see entries, like this one for salads or this one for margarine, with lists of several ostensibly competing brands contaminated with the same stuff from the same plant.

There is nothing inherently wrong with white labelled goods and services, but I do think their use is inadequately disclosed. It is detrimental to our understanding of what we are buying and makes it hard to compare different products.

Apple’s Subscription Requirements Continue to Be Confusing for Third-Party Developers ⇥ mjtsai.com

This series of posts compiled by Michael Tsai regarding Down Dog’s App Store rejection — ostensibly for not automatically charging users after a free trial period has lapsed — illustrates the still-confusing world of subscription pricing. Everything from an app’s registration screen, through the free trial process, and through cancellation is, for any app, not good enough for users and developers.

I think there is a lot that Apple can and should do to improve subscriptions. First, I agree with Ryan Jones that the subscription opt-in process should be consistent systemwide. To say that Apple’s design guidance isn’t always followed would be an understatement. Bad faith merchants have exploited subscriptions for years and, even with a team attempting to crack down on abuses, it remains a problem.

In the midst of the controversy a couple of weeks ago regarding Hey’s rejection, I saw plenty of calls for Apple to allow third-party payment processors within apps. I understand that argument and I get why Apple’s solution sucks for developers for reasons beyond money. But the in-app payment screen means that I don’t have to trust that an app from some developer is going to steal my credit card details. I prefer Apple’s dialog to just about anything else I’ve used. I’d like to see it improved and extended to the entire subscription process, not scrapped.

Second, users should be notified when billing is about to start after a free trial and be allowed to cancel in the notification. I’m sure this will cut into revenue for some apps, but it’s only fair to users.

Third, I think active subscriptions need to be easier to find. Right now, the easiest way to find them is either via the App Store, by tapping on the profile picture in the upper-right, or in Settings in the topmost menu item. But neither of these things look like buttons — the item in the App Store is just a picture, and the Settings menu item looks like no other table view cell in iOS. Its description also provides only the faintest of clues: “Apple ID, iCloud, Media & Purchases”. It does not say “subscriptions”.

Lastly, apps should be required to show a “cancel subscription” button in their settings if they offer subscription purchases. Making it easy to cancel shows a degree of trust and transparency that the subscription is worth the cost. Good apps lock users in by being continuously compelling, not by making cancellations difficult.

As Major Companies Pull Advertising, Facebook Executives Admit to ‘Trust Deficit’ ⇥ ft.com

The Anti-Defamation League:

In response to Facebook’s repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms, six organizations today announced a new campaign, #StopHateforProfit, that asks large Facebook advertisers to show they will not support a company that puts profit over safety. ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color Of Change, Free Press and Common Sense have created a coalition of the nation’s most storied civil rights organizations calling for some of the world’s largest corporations to pause advertising on Facebook during the month of July 2020.

Megan Graham, CNBC:

Verizon said on Thursday it is pulling advertising on Facebook until the company “can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable.”

A company spokesperson said the pause applies to both Facebook and Instagram. It comes as marketers including Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia and REI have also said they plan to pause advertising on the platforms.

Anthony Ha, TechCrunch:

Then today, it was joined by consumer goods giant Unilever, which said it will halt all U.S. advertising on Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and even Twitter, at least until the end of the year.

“Based on the current polarization and the election that we are having in the U.S., there needs to be much more enforcement in the area of hate speech,” Unilever’s executive vice president of global media Luis Di Como told The Wall Street Journal.

Put a pin in “Unilever”.

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

A leading Facebook executive has told advertisers the company is suffering from a “trust deficit” as it tries to stop brands joining a boycott over its policies on political content moderation.

The world’s largest social media group joined a conference call with almost 200 advertisers on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the discussion. Senior policy executives then defended Facebook’s decision to allow several controversial posts from US president Donald Trump to remain on its platform.

According to leaked audio of the call obtained by the Financial Times, Neil Potts, Facebook’s head of trust and safety policy, acknowledged that the company suffered from a “trust deficit” but added that it was “here to listen” to its clients’ concerns. The call was convened by the Interactive Advertising Bureau trade body in Canada.

Tanya Dua, Business Insider (both this and the Financial Times link above are ostensibly paywalled, but I trust that you are clever):

Mark Zuckerberg this week addressed a group of top-ranking executives from agency holding companies and advertisers including Anheuser-Busch InBev, Dentsu Aegis Network, and Omnicom Media Group.

The companies are part of the client council, a small-knit group of marketing heavyweights from brands and ad agencies who work closely with Facebook on product features and other feedback.

He acknowledged the advertisers’ concerns over its policies on political content moderation, explained the company’s position, tried to assure them that the company was reviewing policies and decision-making processes, and took questions.

Casey Newton:

Very cynical take: ad budgets are shrinking already during the pandemic. Why not get some applause for it?

Seb Joseph, reporting for Digiday in April:

The planning process for marketers is being thrown into disarray. With uncertainty pervading all aspects of business, marketers are forced to pare down their plans and focus only on a month or two head. Annual plans are, for the most part, a relic of a different era.

“In many cases, we’re either in re-planning mode or ring-fencing budgets for certain brands,” said the chief media officer at global [consumer packaged goods] manufacturer.

[…]

In reality, what happens is those brands that are doing moderately well for the business will get fewer media dollars in the second and third quarters of the year to ease the company’s cash flow on the basis that more will be eventually invested in the fourth quarter to ensure those targets are met, said the chief media officer.

Molly Fleming, reporting for MarketingWeek in April:

Unilever is stopping major advertising production and exploring cheaper media in a bid to make savings during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The [fast-moving consumer goods] giant’s chief executive, Alan Jope, told investors on a call today (23 April) that the company would be halting the production of major ad campaigns and “reviewing all spend to be effective”.

It is very hard to know how effective the ADL’s campaign is when companies are reducing their advertising budgets anyway. To be clear, I do not think that the ADL itself is cynically taking advantage of lower spending, but it is very possible that some companies are shamelessly rationalizing their withdrawal.

Republican Senators Introduce Bill to Destroy End-to-End Encryption ⇥ cnet.com

Alfred Ng, CNet:

On Tuesday, Republican lawmakers introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which calls for an end to “warrant-proof” encryption that’s disrupted criminal investigations. The bill was proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, along with Sens. Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn. If passed, the act would require tech companies to help investigators access encrypted data if that assistance would help carry out a warrant.

Lawmakers and the US Justice Department have long battled with tech companies over encryption, which is used to encode data. The Justice Department argues that encryption prevents investigators from getting necessary evidence from suspects’ devices and has requested that tech giants provide “lawful access.”

[…]

The proposed legislation stops short of requiring tech companies to create a backdoor, noting that the attorney general is prohibited from giving specific steps on how tech companies need to comply with lawful access orders.

It may not require a specific implementation, but eradicating meaningful encryption by introducing vulnerabilities is exactly what this bill mandates:

The debate over encryption and lawful access has raged on, unresolved, for years. The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act would bring an end to warrant-proof encryption in devices, platforms, and systems.

Pay little attention to the deliberate use of “warrant-proof” to describe end-to-end encryption. All end-to-end encryption is unable to be accessed by anyone other than the users at each endpoint; that is, almost always, a very good thing.

There is simply no way to do what Senate Republicans are envisioning without some form of back door access. But, as writing that into the bill would likely trigger a First Amendment case should it be voted and signed into law, it instead includes some magical thinking:

Directs the Attorney General to create a prize competition to award participants who create a lawful access solution in an encrypted environment, while maximizing privacy and security.

And I would very much like to acquire a house without expending any money.

There are clearly concerns about what nefarious users of end-to-end encryption are hiding, but requiring everyone to bend to that level means that we all become vulnerable. Making it easier for law enforcement to look into the activities of terrible people makes it easier for terrible people to take advantage of everyone else.

Besides, U.S. intelligence took over a year to discover that their most sensitive and powerful hacking tools had been sent outside its ostensibly secure walls. I don’t trust them with having a key to my phone.

Bloomberg: Apple Set to Announce ARM Transition for the Mac at WWDC ⇥ bloomberg.com

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this month at its annual developer conference, according to people familiar with the plans.

The company is holding WWDC the week of June 22. Unveiling the initiative, codenamed Kalamata, at the event would give outside developers time to adjust before new Macs roll out in 2021, the people said. Since the hardware transition is still months away, the timing of the announcement could change, they added, while asking not to be identified discussing private plans.

This will be the third CPU architecture transition for the Mac, after switching from the Motorola 68k series to PowerPC, and then from PowerPC to Intel. If the first ARM Macs begin shipping to customers early next year, that will mean a fifteen year lifespan for the Intel architecture. That compares to twelve years for PowerPC processors, and just ten for Motorola.

By all accounts, I think, the Intel transition went especially smoothly: the company announced its intentions at WWDC 2005 and, by Macworld 2006 — about seven months later — the company was selling its first two Intel-based products in the form of the iMac and MacBook Pro.

My expectations for this transition are very similar. Because the Bloomberg family of publications carry serious business news, it seems that there is one caveat per Gurman scoop. Even so, it would be shocking to me if the ARM transition were announced at any event except WWDC. If this project becomes public at any point this year, you will hear about it two weeks from now.

The biggest question in the lead-up to the Intel announcement in 2005 was whether existing applications would be supported. Apple’s response was Rosetta — an invisible translation layer that allowed simple PowerPC applications to run on Intel at acceptable speeds. Gurman’s story today builds lightly on his report from April, but does not add any information about this key question.

Update: Jesper:

Even if all of these are handled in the most inclusive way possible, unless there’s some sort of extra bone thrown towards Mac Pro users, who now have seen a platform long-neglected, then ostensibly rebooted, twice, back-to-back, the future for the Mac Pro as the value proposition it currently occupies is murky at best. Forming a Pro team and taking everybody out for a ride of gradually coming to terms with actual people’s actual needs only to decide that they are no longer a priority would be unspeakably stupid. Unless Mac Pros will live on in the current form, there’s more to this, although maybe not revealed immediately at this year’s WWDC.

With USB4 subsuming Thunderbolt 3, it’s not impossible that Mac Pro could just get AMD’s best performing CPUs in them and gain an impressive boost. (Although there’s other Intel technology to worry about, such as the wireless video standard one that powers Sidecar.)

Gus Mueller:

Will Apple release ARM based Macs this year? I hope so, I think the upside is huge. We’ll lose things like VMware and other x86 based applications which will be sad, but if it brings better performance and longer battery life, I’m all for it.

I’m hoping that this is transitioned better than a clean break between Intel and ARM Macs. Even though I don’t plan on buying a new Mac for years, it already sucks when I can’t open some 32-bit app on my MacBook Air running Catalina.

I was reading Jason Snell’s MacOS 10.16 wish list today, and he concludes a section about improving Catalina’s frustrating security restrictions like so:

I don’t need macOS to become less secure. I do think Apple needs to the work to make it easier for users to use their Macs, their apps, and their files without the operating system getting in their way.

Good computing gets out of the way. Apple’s software and hardware, at the best of times, gets out of the way. In my ideal world, Apple’s ARM Mac transition will erect the fewest barriers for users and be as seamless as possible. We shall see.