Search Results for: ostensibly

‘Visit Eroda’ Is a Tourism Campaign for an Island That Doesn’t Exist ⇥ waxy.org

Andy Baio:

Late last week, people on Twitter started noticing sponsored tweets promoting the island of Eroda, linking to a website advertising its picturesque views, marine life, and seaside cuisine.

The only catch? Eroda doesn’t exist. It’s completely fictional. Musician/photographer Austin Strifler was the first to notice, bringing attention to it in a long thread that unraveled over the last few days.

The creators of the Visit Eroda campaign covered their tracks well. According to Baio, they didn’t leave any identifying information in image metadata, domain records, or in the site’s markup.

Ryan J:

I verified a connection between @visiteroda and @Harry_Styles. The Eroda page is using a [Facebook] pixel installed on http://hstyles.co.uk. You can only track websites you have control of. They are related.

I’m not arguing that a promotional campaign for Harry Styles’ new record should be taken as a serious privacy violation; I am, in fact, quite sober. But I think there’s a lesson in the campaign’s difficulty for identifying data to be completely disassociated. A need for behaviourally-targeted advertising is what ultimately made it easy to reassociate the anonymous website.

See also: A 2011 article by Andy Baio in which he describes how he was able to figure out the author of an ostensibly anonymous blog because of a shared Google Analytics account.

Owen Williams Rounds Up ⇥ onezero.medium.com

Hey, remember how a change was made to more accurately scan private API use for Mac App Store apps, and it caused Electron apps to be rejected because they rely upon Chromium? And even though these apps are still available for the Mac, they’re just not in the Mac App Store until the Electron project excludes said private APIs?

In Owen Williams’ eyes, this is nothing less than Apple “trying to kill web technology”. That’s right: Apple is trying to kill the web on all of its platforms, starting with the Mac:

But Apple has a reason not to like this recycling of web technology. It wants its Mac App Store to be filled with apps that you can’t find anywhere else, not apps that are available on every platform.

That’s why they’ve been so hesitant to promote cross-platform apps like those in the Microsoft Office and the Adobe suites, going so far as to only give them a few minutes of keynote time and publishing their press releases.

Electron has used these private APIs for years without issue. These private APIs allow developers to, for instance, drastically improve power usage whereas Apple’s sanctioned tools make the user experience worse. In the majority of these cases, Apple doesn’t provide real alternatives for developers who want to access these private API features.

Are private APIs unfair? Almost inherently so. Should the use of any API be withheld from distributed software until a public API is available for third-party developer use? That’s debatable.

But, again, Apple is not prohibiting the use of private APIs generally; they just don’t want apps in the Mac App Store that use private APIs. That’s a big difference.

Also, for what it’s worth, the Mozilla post that Williams links to doesn’t actually say that they’re using any restricted or private APIs, just that they updated Firefox to use Core Animation to improve its battery life and performance on MacOS.

Developers could distribute their apps from their own websites, asking users to download them directly. But that means abandoning features like Apple’s auto-update mechanism from the Mac App Store and iCloud sync. And this direct-to-consumer method could soon be locked down, too, with Apple’s controversial notarization requirements potentially requiring their review.

Setting aside the ability to use iCloud syncing in apps not distributed through the Mac App Store, notarization does not equate to locking down MacOS to outside distribution, despite Williams’ scaremongering. I have problems with notarization and Apple’s strategy for MacOS security, but Williams’ interpretation is overly simplistic and dependent on fear.

Williams follows with a couple of examples of how Apple does not implement new web standards as quickly as other browser makers do, and that leads him to this thesis:

Apple’s subtle, anti-competitive practices don’t look terrible in isolation, but together they form a clear strategy: Make it so painful to build with web-based technology on Apple platforms that developers won’t bother.

First, the premise of this argument isn’t a secret, nor is it new. Apple has long said that apps which are basically wrappers around websites should just be websites — most recently in September.

Second, Apple continues to develop and improve upon in-app web functionality, including fixing things like lacklustre WebRTC support in third-party apps, something Williams complains about in his post.

Third, encouraging a distinction between apps and websites does not therefore lead to the headline “Apple Is Trying to Kill Web Technology”. That’s rounding up to the nearest crisis position, and is wildly misleading. Plenty of ostensibly native apps continue to use web technologies — even many of Apple’s.

Apple has done a lot of stupid and controlling things in the moderation of their App Stores, but this isn’t one of those instances, and it certainly does not produce the panic-inducing headline of Williams’ post.

MacOS Catalina’s Teething Problems ⇥ tyler.io

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple rolled out Catalyst, the technology to transition iPad apps into Mac versions, on Monday. It’s the initial step toward a bigger goal: By 2021, developers should be able to build an app once and have it work on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers through a single, unified App Store. But the first iteration, which appears to still be quite raw and in a number of ways frustrating to developers, risks upsetting users who may have to pay again when they download the Mac version of an iPad app they’ve already bought.

From a user’s perspective, buying different apps on different platforms is the status quo; and, as the subscription model continues to grow in popularity, it makes little difference.

Gurman, continued:

Developers have found several problems with Apple’s tools for bringing iPad apps over to Mac computers. Some features that only make sense on iPad touchscreens, such as scrollable lists that help users select dates and times on calendars, are showing up on the Mac, where the input paradigm is still built around a keyboard and mouse or trackpad.

Troughton-Smith said Mac versions of some apps can’t hide the mouse cursor while video is playing. He’s also found problems with video recording and two-finger scrolling in some cases, along with issues with using the keyboard and full-screen mode in video games. Thomson, the PCalc developer, said some older Mac computers struggle to handle Catalyst apps that use another Apple system called SceneKit for 3-D gaming and animations.

Catalyst is a frustrating bridge between the entirely-discrete AppKit and UIKit worlds, and the ostensibly cross-platform SwiftUI model. It’s “frustrating” because apps built with it don’t feel like Mac apps, and it’s probably too early to start building with SwiftUI since it will likely change dramatically for developers over the next few years. It’s an awkward middle ground that isn’t as good as either. Apple’s promotion of it as “just a checkbox” in Xcode — and, weirdly, using that as part of its pitch to users — is overly optimistic.

That’s not to say that there are no good Catalyst apps. John Voorhees reviewed Lire for MacOS and was fairly impressed with its platform-specific customizations. But it’s a harder process than Apple promotes to developers, and I’m still not confident we’ll see truly great apps built with Catalyst.

Tyler Hall has compiled a list of bugs that he has run into so far:

I love the Mac and everything its software and hardware stand for. The iMac Pro and new Mac mini are phenomenal. The revamped Mac Pro (six years? really?) is a damn beast. And, honestly, I don’t even mind USB-C.

But the keyboards, the literally hundreds if not thousands of predatory scams on the Mac App Store, whatever the fuck is going on with Messages.app on macOS, iCloud Drive, the boneheaded, arrogant, literally-put-on-the-consumer-facing-marketing-website claim that iPad-to-Mac with Catalyst was merely a checkbox, all the dumb, stupid little bugs I mentioned above, and the truckload of other paper-cuts I’m sure to run into once I’m on Catalina for more than 48 hours…

My god.

It is absolutely clear that the Mac is far outside of what the upper-ranks of Apple is focusing on.

It is unsurprising to find bugs in an x.0 release of anything, but this post is maddening. The number and variety of bugs in iCloud-connected things is concerning when it displays error messages; it’s even worse when something silently fails.1

It’s not the fault of the engineers; it’s the fault of whichever parties have decided that software updates must ship annually. While I’m happy to see that they’re willing to delay features that aren’t ready, Apple’s operating system updates are promoted every June with features that may not ship for months after the initial release and the first versions are still full of absurd bugs. It feels chaotic and uncontrolled — like all middle managers for every organization are not on speaking terms.

  1. A quick aside that has little to do with Catalina but has everything to do with silent failure and bug reporting: I’ve written a couple of times about how the Home app simply doesn’t work for me on any device. It just displays a screen that says “Loading Accessories and Scenes” and has an infinitely-running spinner on it. There is no error message; there is no way to move past this.

    What’s supposed to happen, according to Apple, is that a button for resetting HomeKit should appear somewhere on that screen if you leave it open for half an hour. This is their official troubleshooting recommendation. I cannot possibly stress enough how absurd it is that someone decided that the best way to present a reset button is for a screen to be left on and running in the foreground for an entire episode of Last Week Tonight, and users should somehow expect to know that a button will emerge from an otherwise-empty space. It’s also silly that there’s no remedy for HomeKit errors anywhere between live with it and delete everything; why isn’t there a way to roll back to a known good configuration?

    Anyway, I’ve tried this several times on different devices across four versions of iOS — 10.0 through 13.2 — and in MacOS Mojave, and I’ve never seen this unicorn of a button.

    This wasn’t a big deal — I don’t have any HomeKit devices — until I updated to tvOS 13, which prompted me to add the device to my Home network. I tried; it failed, predictably. And I have an allergy to red notification dots in Settings. So I got in touch with Apple support. In the past two weeks, I’ve spoken on the phone for several hours, sent in a couple of sysdiagnose examples, and have repeatedly pointed out that this occurs on all of my devices, so it’s likely to be something iCloud related and all I want to do is start from scratch. I don’t blame the support representatives for their inability to fix this, but it is tedious and irritating that there is seemingly no way for me to fix this silently-presenting problem myself. ↥︎

One Year After ‘The Big Hack’

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Bloomberg’s publication of a story about Chinese intelligence intercepting the supply chain of Supermicro, a company which has built and sold servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and dozens of other companies. Apparently, they developed a chip that looked identical to a rice-sized standard component placed along the main power lines of a server; the implanted chip ostensibly contained a processor and networking capabilities and could, theoretically, act as a backdoor for Supermicro servers.

It sounded like the information security scoop of the decade — except there’s virtually no proof that any of it is true.

At the time of the story’s publication, representatives from the named companies denied Bloomberg’s reporting in statements that left virtually no wiggle room. Tim Cook called for the story’s retraction — a call that was soon echoed by Amazon and Supermicro. Michael Riley — who reported the story alongside Jordan Robertson — took to Twitter on October 5 to point out that the physical evidence would make it “hard to keep more [details] from emerging”.

So far, that has not happened.

On October 9, the duo published a followup story claiming that backdoor hardware was found on a Supermicro server belonging to a telecom firm. Their report relied on documents provided by Yossi Appleboum who subsequently argued in an interview with ServeTheHome that Bloomberg’s characterization was incorrect. Appleboum claimed that the problem is broader than Supermicro and the entire supply chain in China was compromised; however, no evidence was provided publicly to support his assertions.

And that was pretty much the last update we heard from Bloomberg’s reporters regarding this important information security scoop. Michael Riley published just one story between October 9, 2018 and August 31, 2019; Jordan Robertson reported nothing for Bloomberg until September 2, 2019. Given an entire year to dig around on this huge story, no other publication has been able to independently verify their claims.

Here’s every significant development I can find from the past year:

  • At the end of October last year, Erik Wemple of the Washington Post reported that the then-Director of National Intelligence — the turnover in this administration is wild — and an NSA official had no evidence to support Riley and Robertson’s story.

  • In November, Wemple wrote about Bloomberg’s continued reporting efforts. An investigative reporter who wasn’t part of the team behind the original “Big Hack” pieces emailed Apple employees to try to figure out what was right and what was wrong. In conversations with Wemple, Apple employees disputed everything about the story and subsequent rumours about internal Apple investigations.

  • In December, Supermicro announced that a third-party investigator had found “no evidence of any malicious hardware”.

  • In April, Wemple reported that Bloomberg submitted the story for a National Magazine Award. It was not a finalist.

  • In August, the story received Pwnie awards for the Most Over-Hyped Bug and the Most Epic Fail at Black Hat.

  • Last month, a vulnerability was discovered in Supermicro servers that would allow remote USB access. It was patched the following day.

  • Also last month, Michael Riley got promoted. Congratulations.

Unfortunately, a year later, we’re still no closer to understanding what happened with this story. Bloomberg still stands by it, but hasn’t published a follow-up story from its additional reporting. No other news organization has corroborated the original story in any capacity. After being annihilated after the story’s publication, Supermicro’s stock has bounced back.

Most upsetting is that we don’t know the truth here in any capacity. We don’t know how the story was sourced originally other than the vague descriptions given about their roles and knowledge. We don’t know what assumptions were made as Riley and Robertson almost never quoted their sources. We don’t know anything about the thirty additional companies — aside from Amazon and Apple — that were apparently affected, nor if any of the other nine hundred customers of Supermicro found malicious hardware. We don’t know what role, if any, Bloomberg’s financial services business played in the sourcing and publication of this story, since they were also users of Supermicro servers. We don’t know the truth of what is either the greatest information security scoop of the decade or the biggest reporting fuck-up of its type.

What does that say about Bloomberg’s integrity?

iFixit Really Doesn’t Think Apple Deserves Any Credit for Using Recycled Aluminum in New Products ⇥ ifixit.com

iFixit took apart a couple of the new Apple Watch models and found a wildly different battery in the 40mm model than in the 44mm. They also took the time to snark about the recycled aluminum case.

Craig Lloyd:

Now, about Apple’s claim that the Series 5 Sport cases are made from “100% recycled aluminum.” While using recycled materials is great, the truth is most of the world’s aluminum is already recycled, and recycled aluminum is dramatically cheaper than the freshly-mined variety. The real question is whether Apple uses any recycled aluminum that wouldn’t have been recycled anyway. And after analyzing Apple’s statements on the matter, the answer seems to be no. Apple is in line with industry standards, and isn’t remaking the field. Recycling all the lithium or cobalt in their batteries would be a true leap forward, and Apple may well be working on something like that, but using recycled aluminum isn’t much to get excited about.

Let’s start with the overall argument: Apple’s use of recycled aluminum is a form of greenwashing because aluminum is already recycled, so they shouldn’t get credit for using the existing supply chain. That seems, to me, like a harsh oversimplification of a reasonable and more nuanced critique.

If it’s truly the case that the aluminum Apple uses has likely always been recycled — as Lloyd implies in the second and third sentences of this paragraph — one would think that they would have mentioned this before. After all, they’ve long explained that one of the reasons they use aluminum in the first place is because it’s highly recyclable. If Lloyd’s implications are correct, it should be trivial for Apple to make products that are ostensibly nearly fully recycled already and turn them into 100% recycled aluminum, right? But they didn’t say that they were doing so until the introduction of the new Mac Mini and Retina MacBook Air last year, which suggests that Lloyd’s cynical reading is simply incomplete. Furthermore, it’s worth asking why none of the company’s major competitors ever attempts to argue environmental bonafides.

For what it’s worth, I think Maddie Stone wrote a much more thoughtful critique of the company’s environmental efforts last year for Gizmodo. It acknowledges that electronic supply chains are complex and that Apple’s extensive use of the material presents further complications, that using fully-recycled aluminum in cases is a step forward, and says that many of the trace components in the company’s products are still mined in unsustainable ways. All terrific arguments. Lloyd’s critique is shallow and misleading.

Then there’s the way Lloyd pointed out that using recycled aluminum is cheaper than mining more — why bring this up? It isn’t actually relevant; it doesn’t change Lloyd’s argument one bit if you drop it. But it does leave the impression that Apple’s use of recycled aluminum is at least partly for economic reasons — which, I guess, is supposed to be inherently bad and evil. That’s a ludicrous argument. Environmental efforts can go hand-in-hand with economic incentives, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

And if I’m being nitpicky — and I most certainly am but, well, they started it — Apple dropped the “Sport” designation with the introduction of the Series 1 and 2 models.

Wariness of Tech Companies Isn’t Necessarily Resulting in Reduced Use ⇥ nytimes.com

Rob Walker, New York Times:

It’s fun, and increasingly fashionable, to complain about technology.

Counterargument: it has always been “fashionable” to complain about technological change.

Our own devices distract us, others’ devices spy on us, social media companies poison public discourse, new wired objects violate our privacy, and all of this contributes to a general sense of runaway change careening beyond our control. No wonder there’s a tech backlash.

But, really, is there? There certainly has been talk of a backlash, for a couple of years now. Politicians have discussed regulating big tech companies more tightly. Fines have been issued, breakups called for. A tech press once dedicated almost exclusively to gadget lust and organizing conferences that trot out tech lords for the rest of us to worship has taken on a more critical tone; a drumbeat of exposés reveal ethically and legally dubious corporate behavior. Novels and movies paint a skeptical or even dystopian picture of where tech is taking us. We all know people who have theatrically quit this or that social media service, or announced digital sabbaticals. And, of course, everybody kvetches, all the time.

However, there is the matter of our actual behavior in the real-world marketplace. The evidence there suggests that, in fact, we love our devices as much as ever. There is no tech backlash.

Walker’s entire argument is predicated on the fact that despite numerous lawsuits, data breaches, widespread recognition of privacy violations, and antitrust investigations — all of which represent a radical shift in the way we think about technology companies from just a few years ago — consumer use has risen and, therefore, we are not reacting with our behaviour. It is a silly argument that masks misgivings held by the public at large.

An Edelman survey from earlier this year found that respondents in developed nations were weakly trusting of tech companies; it also found that respondents were generally capable of separating hardware manufacturers — which they generally trusted — from social media companies, which they did not. But we still use Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to increasing degrees. We know they’re toxic to us and we know that they don’t give a shit about our privacy, so why do we do it?

Well, probably for similar reasons as we do lots of things that we know are terrible for us. We’ve known tobacco usage increases the likelihood of myriad diseases for decades, but the prevalence of smoking has not consistently declined. Likewise, we’ve known for years that our emissions are smothering the planet, but we keep on emitting at ever-greater rates. Our understanding that something is damaging does not necessarily mean that we will not continue our poor behaviour. After all, we still find that these risky choices are often at odds with how much value we get from these things. We emit more because we heat bigger homes, drive more fuel-thirsty cars, and want more clothes.1

Likewise, we want to send out potluck invitations without starting a gigantic “reply all” email thread, complain about the news in public, and watch goofy videos. We want to passively keep in touch with family, friends, and colleagues. We may even want to experiment with photography.

We’ve weighed all of these clearly- and immediately-tangible benefits against the more difficult question of what effects it will have for us to compromise our privacy to monopolistic tech companies, and many people hesitantly accepted those benefits often years ago. Disentangling your real social life from your electronic social life can be very difficult, especially if you’ve built up years of cruft. It’s a job unto itself.

Predictably, venture capital types have reacted to this article supportively, confident in the safety of their practice of growing the user base of bleeding-edge tech products2 and then slapping some surveillance-based ads on them. It’s easier to loudly dismiss public concerns about technology than it is to reform the business model of many of the biggest Silicon Valley firms raring for their IPO.

Meanwhile, public concern over technology is, indeed, far greater than it was not too long ago. Trust in Facebook dropped precipitously after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke — and didn’t recover after a solid year of serious problems were reported — to the extent that Facebook is pretending to change its business model. Google also decided to become a company that ostensibly protects privacy. If these companies were confident that users didn’t see any problems with their services and business model, why would they feel the need to so aggressively tout their privacy credentials, no matter how weak?

Big tech companies with exploitative business practices are worried that their tainted reputation will overshadow our enthusiasm for the implicit progress of high technology. But you can’t quickly turn this billion-passenger ship around, especially when non-technical publications ignored the privacy and security risks of services like these for years.

  1. We also fail to adequately regulate the biggest polluters, which are not consumers directly. ↥︎

  2. If the product is software-based, it’s probably wedging itself into an everyday industry and stripping it of all regulation because “it’s just a platform”. If it’s hardware-based, it’s something that you own that does not presently have either WiFi or Bluetooth, and now has WiFi and Bluetooth. Fund me. ↥︎

Lock-In and Ecosystems

On an earnings call in 2009, Tim Cook was asked how the company would fare when it inevitably lost Steve Jobs in the CEO post, and he responded by delivering a now-famous explanation of how he views Apple’s core values. It was, typically for Cook, an efficient and profound monologue that, among other statements, captured core truths for what sets the company apart:

[…] We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make […] We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

I trimmed a fair bit of this, but these two statements complement each other beautifully. The tight integration of the company’s hardware and software — and the individual teams within those disciplines — have come to define the company’s key products: the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, and AirPods. An arbitrary set of Bluetooth headphones cannot replicate the ease of pairing, connectivity, and device switching that Apple can achieve by building both the hardware and software sides of the AirPods.

Internet services have not been an exception to this, as they are universally better on Apple’s own platforms, but they have offered an opportunity to see what the company will offer on a cross-platform basis. iCloud — as with its MobileMe predecessor — has a Windows client; Apple Music is available for Android phones. The company is bringing the Apple TV Plus service to virtually every platform — including some television hardware. All of these services can be accessed through a web browser, too. But iMessage, Apple Arcade, and Apple News are all stubbornly limited to products with an Apple logo on them.

And so is the Apple Card. Damon Beres of Medium’s OneZero publication sees all of these things — but particularly the card — as egregious examples of lock-in:

In fact, Apple’s most fascinating hardware release in ages arrived last month, a thin slab of titanium with accompanying software that — yes — you can use to order clothes while in the tub. The Apple Card connects to your iPhone’s Wallet app and can pop up as a default option whenever you use Apple Pay. It makes monitoring your finances kind of pleasant: A digital representation of the card is rendered on-screen and stained with colors (blue for transportation, orange for food, etc.) related to how you’re spending money. And the card, like so many other Apple products in recent years, has been developed not just to provide a good service to consumers but to increase the gravitational pull of the technology brand itself.

Others have certainly noted its major value to Apple: In being such an appealing payment option, and by only working with an iOS device, the Apple Card could be understood less as a typical credit card and more as a trojan horse. It will keep you in orbit around a Cupertino blackhole that sucks in cash for annual iPhone upgrades, new Apple TV+ shows, Apple Music, video games, MacBooks, and AirPods.

Throughout this piece, Beres seems to insist that Apple’s credit card is somehow stickier than that from any traditional financial institution, but I don’t think it is. It’s well-integrated throughout iOS, but so is any card that works with Apple Pay. You can use it with a new iPhone, of course, but it still works with any iPhone that has Apple Pay, all the way back to the iPhone 6. I guess it looks nicer than most credit cards, and the physical version is classy as hell. Is that really “lock in” in a way different from any credit card?

But Beres doesn’t stop at the Apple Card. This article points to all of Apple’s services — including TV Plus, which is, to reiterate, available on virtually all platforms independent of use or ownership of other Apple products or services — as evidence of a giant spinning lock-in machine.

Beres compares this to the approaches of other companies:

Any tech giant worth its salt is doing the same thing. Amazon may not have enough pull in the hardware game to make Prime streaming exclusive to something like the Fire TV Stick, but its Prime credit card, at least, will keep you shopping on Amazon, giving you 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases. And it has expanded its Alexa service to proprietary tablets, security cameras, and alarm clocks. If you’re into the Amazon Echo, there’s no way you’re going to switch to Facebook’s Portal, which itself hooks into a shared universe of messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger. Samsung is trying — and struggling — to establish a line of Galaxy products that tap into its Bixby A.I. Buying a gadget today is rarely a one-off choice; it’s an opportunity for a company to keep you on a platform.

Here’s where I have the most disagreement with Beres, and these arguments of Apple’s ostensibly severe lock-in more generally. I don’t think Apple’s products are necessarily sticky because of an ecosystem effect, but I do think the ecosystem becomes stronger as more users are retained. Apple routinely has one of the highest customer retention rates in the industry, and they regularly report some of the highest customer satisfaction rates. I wonder if there’s a correlation.

To compare this to the lock-in activities of other companies is at its most effective only at a shallow level. Apple’s stuff works better when it’s used in conjunction with other Apple things, of course, but if you want to stop using the company’s products and services, you can do that almost piecemeal or wholesale, if you wish. You cannot say the same about any other major technology company, as Kashmir Hill discovered earlier this year:

Critics of the big tech companies are often told, “If you don’t like the company, don’t use its products.” I did this experiment to find out if that is possible, and I found out that it’s not — with the exception of Apple.

These companies are unavoidable because they control internet infrastructure, online commerce, and information flows. Many of them specialize in tracking you around the web, whether you use their products or not. These companies started out selling books, offering search results, or showcasing college hotties, but they have expanded enormously and now touch almost every online interaction. These companies look a lot like modern monopolies.

No matter how powerful Apple seems to be, it is entirely possible to never use a product or service from them again. It is, I grant you, expensive and time-consuming to change your computer, phone, streaming music service, encrypted messaging platform, and anything else you use from them — your Apple News Plus subscription, I suppose — but it’s not out of the question. It is virtually impossible to stop interacting with non-Apple tech giants. You can’t escape Facebook, either, as their beacons and scripts keep track of you as you browse most popular websites. Google is trying to replace HTML with AMP, and is globally dominant in various horizontally- and vertically-integrated product categories. You can stop shopping at Amazon, but you’re not going to be able to rid yourself of the infrastructure of the modern internet. Apple’s power comes at a platform integration level; their competitors have absorbed themselves into the web and internet. If you wish to participate in the web today, you have little choice but to accept the use of — and tracking by — the services of Apple’s competitors.

That is, I think, true lock-in that makes Apple’s interconnected services, hardware, and accessories look comparatively banal.

One other thing in Beres’ piece I’d like to mention is this paragraph at the top:

Apple’s certainly something different now than it was even just a couple of years ago, when the iPhone X debuted with a notch and a dutifully frenzied press. Its keynote event on September 10, described by my colleague Will Oremus as its least interesting, cemented a new identity for a technology brand that no longer leans quite so much on surprising gadgets to make its name: improvements to the Apple Watch, iPad, and of course the iPhone were short of jaw-dropping. (The Apple Watch’s face is now always on — like, you know, a real watch — and the iPhone gained a third camera lens.)

This is a criticism that has been leveled at every Apple product launch that lacked a radically new hardware design language for the iPhone since the 3GS. In fact, even when there was new hardware, Apple was accused of playing it safe and boring. The iPad was known as “just a big iPod Touch” when it came out in 2010. For the past decade, analysts have called Apple’s products dull and uninspired, and the products have gone on to sell in unfathomably large numbers. Little has changed in that time except the ever-widening gulf in analyst expectation and customer reaction.

Old-Media Celebrities are Vlogging on YouTube ⇥ vice.com

Sophie Kleeman, Vice:

“Am I crazy?” Naomi Campbell asks in her very first vlog. “I’m opening my life to YouTube!” Campbell snaps a movie slate and laughs. She’s wearing an oyster-colored turtleneck sweater. Her hair is long, pin-straight, and parted perfectly down the middle. She sits on a grey couch in what appears to be her home, or at least a very good approximation of what one assumes the home of a brilliant supermodel must look like, with bright pink flowers, gentle lighting, and soft throw pillows.

She’s not crazy. But she’s also not alone. Campbell has joined a growing handful of very famous, very mainstream celebrities who have ventured into the wilds of YouTube, a platform known more than a smidge dismissively for sugary makeup gurus and Casey Neistat, and decidedly more seriously for extremism and the people who weaponize it. But over the past 20 months, Campbell — along with Will Smith, Jack Black, Zac Efron, Victoria Beckham, Jennifer Lopez, Alexa Chung, and Jason Momoa, among others — have ostensibly opened up their lives to the site’s 2 billion monthly users. Others, like prodigal YouTube son Justin Bieber, are working with the company on “top-secret” original content.

This article transported me back to when celebrities first joined Twitter and spoke with fans and followers directly. It brought those celebrities back down to Earth — until, of course, you remembered that most of what gets posted to their account has a full production crew of photographers, makeup artists, technicians, public relations professionals, and social media managers behind it. Even if you know that, though, it still creates an illusion of being more honest than it is, while simultaneously lending YouTube greater legitimacy and prestige.

The FTC Completely Blew Its Settlement With Equifax

The rollercoaster of stories that followed last month’s settlement between the FTC and Equifax was truly something to behold. The FTC touted its value, which critics excoriated as inadequate. Articles soon explained how to get a cash settlement for those who already have a credit monitoring service, but were quickly followed by those arguing that the widely-publicized $125 figure was dependent on the number of claimants for a $31 million pool. Some, like Karl Bode at Vice, said that the “FTC should fine itself for false advertising” after claiming that those affected could be eligible for $125.

I don’t think this fully grasps just how badly the FTC blew this settlement, and primarily for a reason almost entirely unrelated to the confusion about the $31 million fund for credit monitoring payouts.

I was among many who got this wrong when I repeated the claim of the $125 payout, and also in my summary of why that $125 figure may be incorrect, so I thought it would be valuable to go back to the settlement itself to explain why this is a raw deal. In its press release, the FTC summarized the divvying up of the $575–700 million settlement:

  • $100 million is paid as a fine to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

  • $175 million is paid to settle cases brought by 48 states, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico

  • $300 million is set aside for a consumer restitution fund, which would compensate individual claimants directly

It’s that last bucket of cash in which two specific piles of money reside. The first is a $31 million pool for alternative payouts for credit monitoring, which the FTC required Equifax provide to claimants. But if a claimant already has credit monitoring, they can opt to be paid up to $125 instead. And we will get to that “up to” in a moment.

A second pool, also of $31 million, is to be used to compensate claimants for time spent dealing with the settlement. For example, if a claimant spent an hour on the phone with an Equifax representative to get their credit frozen, that would be paid out of this second pool.

The remainder of the $300 million is to be set aside for direct out-of-pocket losses arising from the breach, such as those stemming from fraud, identity theft, and so forth. None of the money from this settlement will be given back to Equifax, but the details are not as simple as the FTC portrayed, either.

I want to get the matter of the $31 million buckets out of the way first, and I think Lily Hay Newman of Wired explains it perfectly:

But not all is lost, and there’s still a decent chance that Equifax will pay you all $125. As Slate points out, the $31 million cap will lift, assuming Equifax hasn’t spent all of the $425 million in its “Consumer Fund” — money it has committed to things like covering people who can specifically document losses stemming from the breach — in four and a half years. At that point, whatever’s left of that $425 million will be applied to the $125 payouts, presenting much better, if belated, odds.

Like all things Equifax, this does not come without a caveat. Even if the full $425 million in the consumer restitution bank account goes towards $125 payments for compensation of credit monitoring services, that amount would only support the claims of 3,400,000 people. Over forty-three times that number were affected by this breach.

Also, because this bucket is part of a pile of money with broader scope, those claims will be mixed with requests for compensation of time spent, as well as direct losses from fraud.

A bigger problem still is that this settlement is designed to mitigate the financial damage to consumers. That would be handy if this data were stolen for economically opportunistic reasons, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A February report from Kate Fazzini at CNBC noted that no Equifax breach data had surfaced anywhere, despite financially-motivated hackers usually publicizing their haul with urgency.

A more likely scenario is that those responsible for exfiltrating Equifax’s files were state actors. A Bloomberg story from September 2017, citing investigators and those briefed on their findings, claimed that China was a likely culprit, though another country could be responsible.1 It is likely that the data stolen — which comes from a financial firm, making it ostensibly more accurate than any old data dump — could be combined with other sources to target specific individuals, per Fazzini’s reporting and Bloomberg’s story.

This settlement does nothing to dissuade state actors from continuing to pilfer sensitive data, nor does it encourage care for those who stockpile information like this. Of course, the FTC has limited scope and powers. It could not accomplish the former, but it certainly could attempt the latter.

Instead, the Commission agreed to a weak deal that barely impacts Equifax’s financial status and does little to encourage better behaviour in data-hoarding industries. Even if this were a financially-motivated crime, this settlement does not protect those affected. But this breach was so much more, and this settlement doesn’t begin to address the far more serious and more likely rationale.

  1. I am obligated to point out that this Bloomberg story bears in its byline the two reporters responsible for the inaccurate “Big Hack” feature.

    By the way, that story just won the Black Hat Pwnie for the most overhyped bug. Congratulations — I guess? — Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson. ↥︎

Tesla Workers in Describe Pressure Meet Goals by Building Model 3s in Tents ⇥ cnbc.com

Lora Kolodny, CNBC:

Current and former Tesla employees working in the company’s open-air “tent” factory say they were pressured to take shortcuts to hit aggressive Model 3 production goals, including making fast fixes to plastic housings with electrical tape, working through harsh conditions and skipping previously required vehicle tests.

For instance, four people who worked on the assembly line say they were told by supervisors to use electrical tape to patch cracks on plastic brackets and housings, and provided photographs showing where tape was applied. They and four additional people familiar with conditions there describe working through high heat, cold temperatures at night and smoky air during last year’s wildfires in Northern California.

Their disclosures highlight the difficult balance Tesla must strike as it ramps up production while trying to stem costs.

I love the idea of everything Tesla ostensibly stands for. Bringing reasonably-priced and reliable electric transport to the masses is a fantastic achievement. But there is so much to dislike about Tesla the company that it compromises my impression of the product. Tesla’s poor manufacturing conditions, offensive labour practices, misleading pricing, and unfocused strategy all make it hard to trust the company to stand by products that are supposed to last several years.

Amazon.com Remains a Mess ⇥ nymag.com

Brian Feldman, New York magazine:

We are now entering the final hours of Prime Day, an alleged sales “event” from Amazon that is actually two days long. The catalyzing idea of Prime Day is ostensibly to conjure a shopping holiday out of thin air, which manifests in reality as “let’s just choose two days in which we bombard people with things they might impulse buy.” The problem with this is that Amazon.com, as far as I can tell, was designed by madmen who were challenged by the richest man on earth to build the most insane website on the planet.

Amazon is starting to remind me of one of those liquidation store brands that I remember being super popular in the late 1990s to early 2000s, or some surplus warehouse. Its inventory is a mix of knockoff items, high fashion next to suspiciously-branded goods, obvious crap, and genuine deals — all piled together, and staffed by overworked and underpaid employees in unsanitary and unsafe conditions.

Apple Sans Ive ⇥ techcrunch.com

Whenever a public-facing executive leaves their job, there will inevitably be a series of stories — typically in business publications — which try to ascertain why they left. Such stories are full of anecdotes and rumours, and it’s sometimes hard to know what to trust or who is grinding what axe.

So, I assume, many of you did the same thing I did for part of this weekend by catching up on a flurry of stories ostensibly giving some background to why Jony Ive is leaving Apple — Mark Gurman and Tripp Mickle wrote the two high-profile pieces, and I also read responses to try to get a handle on their accuracy.

After all that, I was left with the feeling that neither story was entirely convincing. Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch has written a particularly good piece distilling what he’s heard independently, as well as reflecting on Ive’s legacy:

Even though Jony is a ‘unicorn’ designer, Apple has always thrived on small teams with decision makers, and they’re not all one person. The structure of Apple, which does not rely on product managers, still leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of the people actually doing the work. I’m not as concerned as a lot of people are that, with Jony leaving, there will suddenly be a slavish hewing to the needs of ‘ops over all’. It’s not in the DNA.

That doesn’t mean however, that there aren’t still question marks. Jony was an enormous force in this company. It is completely natural to be curious, excited and, hell yeah even worried about what his departure will do to the design focused Apple people love to love.

I have intentionally held off on posting much about Ive’s announced departure for the aforementioned reasons, but this is worth reading.

Update: I also think MG Siegler’s piece is wise.

Update: John Siracusa’s take is typically thoughtful and worth your time. This, in particular, bears worth repeating:

As the leader of design at Apple, Ive inevitably receives acclaim for work done by other people on his team. This is what it means to be the public face of a collaborative endeavor involving hundreds of people. Ive himself is the first to credit his team, always using the word “we” in his appearances in Apple’s design videos. One gets the impression that Ive has historically used “we” to refer to the design team at Apple, rather than Apple as a whole, but he certainly never meant it to refer to himself.

While I think it’s been fairly clear that design at Apple is a huge team endeavour — and though many of the pieces published after last week’s news acknowledge that Ive has taken a reduced role in the day-to-day activity of designing for several years — it remains odd to me that the single arbiter of product taste at the company is now Jeff Williams. Nothing against the guy, but it’s strange for Apple that it’s an MBA in that role.

Postcards From Chernobyl ⇥ theatlantic.com

You may have seen that popular tweet ostensibly showing people “flocking” to Chernobyl to post glamorous photos of themselves on Instagram. Unsurprisingly, that explanation is wildly incorrect.

Taylor Lorenz, the Atlantic:

By yesterday evening, Zupan’s tweet had been collectively shared tens of thousands of times. Even Chrissy Teigen retweeted it to her 11.2 million followers. But the viral tweet’s claim is false, and its premise — that photos at sites of tragedy are inherently self-serving and in poor taste — is misleading.

While the area surrounding the destroyed reactor has undeniably morphed into a tourist destination, and interest in the disaster has spiked since the premiere of HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl, the Instagram geotag offers zero evidence of any uptick in lifestyle influencers visiting the site. Three of the four people that Zupan chose to highlight in his tweet aren’t influencers at all.

Photos like those highlighted in the tweet have been posted on Instagram for years; I know that because I’ve been looking at them for years. I’m not interested in disaster tourism but I’ve long wanted to visit the Duga radar arrays in the Exclusion Zone.

If this silly tweet proves anything about influence, it’s that a television show can spike interest in pretty typical photographs shared on the web — albeit of a place of pain and suffering — and people might ascribe horrible motivations to their subjects.

On the Attainability of Apple’s Professional Products ⇥ macworld.com

Michael Simon, Macworld (content blockers required, obviously):

All said, one of each Pro product will cost you about $25,000, depending on which MacBook Pro and iPad Pro you decide to buy. And that’s the entry-level price. Over the past decade or so, Apple’s Pro products have skyrocketed in price, and now we have a gorgeous Mac Pro and display that costs more than a small sedan. That’s not an Apple tax, that’s an Apple mortgage.

I can already hear the rationalizations: the Mac Pro isn’t for you! That’s why Apple sells the iPad Air! You can buy a MacBook Air! Sure, but for the most part, Apple’s non-Pro products don’t merely represent cheaper versions of their Pro counterparts. They’re completely different machines with older tech. The iPad Air has a home button, the MacBook Air doesn’t have a Touch Bar, etc. (OK, having no Touch Bar might be a benefit, but still.) Apple products have always been luxury items, but it wasn’t that long ago when the most expensive Mac tower topped out at $3,400. Now that doesn’t even get you in the door.

I am sympathetic to arguments that Apple is charging more — and in the case of some products, a lot more — than they used to. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. But I think this article is fairly silly. For one thing, why judge the cost of pro products by adding up the cost of every pro product? Who buys an 11-inch iPad Pro and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro and a 13-inch MacBook Pro and a 15-inch MacBook Pro? What a ludicrous metric.

For another, I’m not even sure that the prices in this article are accurate. I’m not certain that the most expensive Mac tower has ever “topped out at $3,400”. I tried using the Mac Pro configurator from 2009 through the Internet Archive and just upgrading the RAM to 32 GB from the single 6 GB stick it shipped with cost a whopping $3,700.

The Pro Display XDR — for which this article contains the now legally-required amount of hand-wringing over the cost of the stand — could best be compared to the 30-inch Cinema Display. When that product shipped in 2004, it cost $3,299, and you needed to buy a $599 graphic card to run it. The inflation-adjusted cost of that display combination is just shy of $5,300 in 2019 terms.

But there are two other reasons I think this is a poor explanation of the cost of being a pro customer. The first is that some of Apple’s products have actually come down in price. In his pro products list, Simon includes to Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X, which cost about $300 and $200, respectively. But Final Cut Studio was $1,299 and Logic Studio cost $499. These apps are much less expensive today, even if you add on the cost of Motion and Compressor, which are now sold separately.

The second is that the barrier to entry for doing professional-grade work has dropped dramatically from a technical level. Editing HD video is no longer the rarefied duty of the highest-end Macs, and it hasn’t been that way for a while; my iMac does an acceptable job of manipulating 4K video. Every developer wants their code to compile faster, and a well-specced iMac Pro might be more apt for their needs; an even higher-end Mac may not have the right balance of cost to benefit. A machine like this might have more of a niche use. In combination with my previous argument that Apple’s pro apps have come down in price, a lower hardware barrier to entry also means that a media editing workflow including software may actually be less expensive than it used to be.

I don’t want to make this seem like an apology for Apple’s prices generally. The stuff in the $1,200 to $2,000 price bracket, or thereabouts, is of particular concern to me as I think it’s more of a mixed bag of compromises than it used to be. Putting Retina displays and SSDs in nearly every Mac results in far better but more expensive products, and the company’s reduced profit margins in recent years back that up. But I don’t think the pricing of the new Mac Pro or Apple’s pro products in general is as dire as Simon makes it out to be. It’s just reflective of a more niche customer; and, maybe an ostensibly “pro” workflow no longer requires Pro-branded hardware.

Commitments to Privacy Are Necessarily Long-Term Obligations ⇥ theoutline.com

Casey Johnston, the Outline:

Multiple segments of Apple’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference keynote presentation today indicated that Apple is rushing into spaces where other tech companies have already deeply soured customers’ ability to trust them. The presentation doubled down on Apple’s recent privacy-themed advertising campaign, but the problem with this kind of privacy has never been company’s intentions in the moment; it’s that they appear to be unable to resist the intense pull of how lucrative customer data can be. As Apple moves into services while its hardware sales slow down, the recent betrayals of other tech companies who implicitly or explicitly promised to be careful with their users’ data loom very large.

Johnston gives examples of how Google and Facebook started out as ostensibly privacy-aware, but have caved to exploiting user data; she questions whether Apple will be different over the long term, and how we can trust them not to be. What happens if the next CEO doesn’t care at all about privacy? Surely, users are owed a deeper commitment to the privacy of their data than company culture.

I think Apple mostly gets that right by encrypting user data in ways that the company cannot decrypt — in other words, it’s only accessible by the user. Therefore, it is less necessary to trust that they will not abuse user data, as they are not collecting it in a way where they can abuse it. If you have iCloud Backups turned off, much of this data isn’t stored by Apple at all.

This article raises a really great point about privacy’s long-term commitments. Maciej Cegłowski has previously highlighted a hypothetical instance of a queer Russian blogger writing on LiveJournal before its acquisition by a Russian company; shortly thereafter, Russia passed strict homophobic laws, which could put that blogger at risk. Or consider how many apps have scooped up your contact list with your permission — who owns those lists now? What if an indie developer with your contact list in its database gets acquired by a social media giant with a pathological objection to privacy for anyone but its CEO?

It is therefore critically important that user data is encrypted in a way that is impossible for anyone else to decode. Users should be entirely in control of their own data now and forever.

At WWDC, Apple Furthers Its Privacy Lead ⇥ slate.com

April Glaser, Slate:

To use the internet is to constantly slam into locked doors. Want to watch a video? Please sign in. Care to comment? You’ll need to remember your password. Want to keep reading an article? Create an account. Many of us manage these password requests by using our login credentials from Google and Facebook to register with other websites. Clicking on “Sign in with Facebook” and “Sign in with Google” isn’t exactly frictionless, but it’s close.

[…]

Enter Apple. At its annual developer conference on Monday, the company unveiled a new “Sign in with Apple” button for Apple device users to create new logins on websites and apps. It’s the same idea as those Google and Facebook buttons but from a company that’s known to be far more trustworthy with customer data—and that has been emphasizing its privacy bona fides as the other tech companies have come under scrutiny. But Apple isn’t just offering a third option. Users who opt to create new accounts with Apple can also choose to use a randomly generated email address that forwards messages to their actual inbox, preserving customer privacy even further by allowing users to keep their email addresses to themselves without sharing them with another company. […]

Apple:

Please note these summaries of the latest changes and see the App Store Review Guidelines for full details. All guidelines are now enforced for new and existing apps, unless otherwise indicated.

  • Guidelines 1.3 and 5.1.4. In order to help keep kids’ data private, apps in the kids category and apps intended for kids cannot include third-party advertising or analytics software and may not transmit data to third parties. This guideline is now enforced for new apps. Existing apps must follow this guideline by September 3, 2019.

[…]

  • Guideline 5.1.1(vii) (New). Apps that compile information from any source that is not directly from the user or without the user’s explicit consent, even public databases, are not permitted on the App Store.

  • Guideline 5.1.1(i). Apps must get consent for data collection, even if the data is considered anonymous at the time of or immediately following collection.

[…]

Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.

Victoria Song, Gizmodo:

If you’ve ever hunted for a period tracking app, you know there’s a crapton of them in the App Store—and not all of them are good. With Cycles, Apple is adding female health tracking to its Apple Watch. Users will be able to log symptoms, as well as receive notifications of upcoming periods and fertile windows. It’ll also be available for non-watch users via the Health app.

The big thing to note here is Apple’s emphasis on privacy. Flo, Glow, Clue, and Ovia are all big-name women’s health apps that have had some not-so-great press regarding what they do with sensitive data. And better yet, integrating it into the main Health app means you don’t have to do any research or pay fees for a basic tracker.

Apple has continued to emphasize the ways in which they do not track you and are not interested in collecting individual user data — instead, preferring to do as much as possible on users’ devices.1 This is great news for the billion or so people who use Apple’s products, and it puts pressure on others to do better. In some cases, that pressure comes as a result of consumer awareness; in others — as with Apple’s requirement that apps which implement buttons to sign in with Google or Facebook also add a Sign In with Apple button2 — it’s more forceful.

As I’ve written previously, though, it remains bizarre to me that this is an argument that Apple can reasonably make: we build products that do not surveil you or allow advertisers to exploit your private data. That shouldn’t be a marketing statement; that should be a baseline requirement for any service, app, or product. I get the frequent framing of these decisions as a luxury only enjoyed by consumers of pricier electronics, but I think that frustration is misplaced. That privacy is somehow not seen as a fundamental right or worthy of strict legal protections is deeply concerning.

  1. To such an extent that, during the live WWDC recording of John Gruber’s podcast, Craig Federighi flipped the script on the common complaint that Apple is ostensibly catching up to Google, et al. on machine learning, according to Chance Miller’s recap:

    In fact, if you watch recent events from the other guys, you’d be surprised to see they’ve started to say on-device machine learning. They’re actually seeing the light on that topic. I think they’re disadvantaged because part of what makes this possible is building this great hardware and the integration of hardware and software. Pulling this off between a random fleet of devices, it’s really just impossible.

    I think Apple’s long-term bet on privacy is starting to become noticeable for the public. ↥︎

  2. Think Google or Facebook themselves will add this option to their apps, or even be required to do so? ↥︎

Facebook Provides Sensitive User Data to Corporate Partners ⇥ theintercept.com

Sam Biddle, the Intercept:

The source, who discussed Actionable Insights on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press, explained that Facebook has offered the service to carriers and phone makers ostensibly of free charge, with access to Actionable Insights granted as a sweetener for advertising relationships. According to the source, the underlying value of granting such gratis access to Actionable Insights in these cases isn’t simply to help better service cell customers with weak signals, but also to ensure that telecoms and phone makers keep buying more and more carefully targeted Facebook ads. It’s exactly this sort of quasi-transactional data access that’s become a hallmark of Facebook’s business, allowing the company to plausibly deny that it ever sells your data while still leveraging it for revenue. Facebook may not be “selling” data through Actionable Insights in the most baldly literal sense of the word — there’s no briefcase filled with hard drives being swapped for one containing cash — but the relationship based on spending and monetization certainly fits the spirit of a sale. A Facebook spokesperson declined to answer whether the company charges for Actionable Insights access.

The confidential Facebook document provides an overview of Actionable Insights and espouses its benefits to potential corporate users. It shows how the program, ostensibly created to help improve underserved cellular customers, is pulling in far more data than how many bars you’re getting. According to one portion of the presentation, the Facebook mobile app harvests and packages eight different categories of information for use by over 100 different telecom companies in over 50 different countries around the world, including usage data from the phones of children as young as 13. These categories include use of video, demographics, location, use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, personal interests, device information, and friend homophily, an academic term of art. A 2017 article on social media friendship from the Journal of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology defined “homophily” in this context as “the tendency of nodes to form relations with those who are similar to themselves.” In other words, Facebook is using your phone to not only provide behavioral data about you to cellphone carriers, but about your friends as well.

Among the most vastly underreported stories in tech is Facebook’s unique ability to create deep associative data between users and those who did not consent to their privacy-invasive practices. It doesn’t matter if you do not use Facebook’s products; if any of your friends do, Facebook still knows a lot about you.

Consistently Stupid U.S. Administration Solicits Complaints of ‘Bias’ by Websites ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Tony Romm, Washington Post:

The White House on Wednesday escalated its war against Silicon Valley when it announced an unprecedented campaign asking Internet users to share if they had been censored on Facebook, Google and Twitter, tapping into President Trump’s long-running claim that tech giants are biased against conservatives.

The effort, which the White House said on Twitter was directed at users “no matter your views,” seeks to collect names, contact information and other details from Americans. The survey asks whether they have encountered problems on Facebook, Instagram, Google-owned YouTube, Twitter or other social media sites — companies the president frequently takes aim at for alleged political censorship.

This, on the very same day that the Trump administration announced it would not sign a statement pledging to take action to combat and avoid amplifying violent extremist rhetoric on what is ostensibly First Amendment grounds. I’m not saying that they should necessarily sign such a statement as I understand the free speech concerns — though the pledge does not require that government signatories do anything that would curtail freedom of expression — but the contrast is notable.

It’s horseshit anyway because this is pretty obviously a means to build the Trump 2020 campaign’s email list. Also, the U.S. government can’t require private companies to change how they moderate user behaviour because that would be a violation of the First Amendment — but you knew that.

Update: Casey Newton:

In the meantime, “bias” is defined ever downward. In conservative parlance, it now refers to any instance in which the user of a social platform did not have a desired outcome. You didn’t appear high enough in search results? Your video wasn’t promoted by an algorithm? You were suspended for threatening to kill someone? It’s all just “bias” now.

Far enough down the conspiracy hole, everything has meaning, which means nothing really does.

Regarding That Ostensibly ‘Small Number of Customers’ Reporting Problems With Their MacBook Keyboards ⇥ m.signalvnoise.com

David Heinemeier Hansson, writing on Basecamp’s Signal v. Noise blog:

Apple keep insisting that only a “small number of customers have problems” with the MacBook keyboards. That’s bollocks. This is a huge issue, it’s getting worse not better, and Apple is missing the forest for the trees.

The fact is that many people simply do not contact Apple when their MacBook keyboards fail. They just live with an S key that stutters or a spacebar that intermittently gives double. Or they just start using an external keyboard. Apple never sees these cases, so it never counts in their statistics.

It isn’t news that the butterfly keyboard switches in the post-2015 MacBook line are unreliable to the degree that it has breached a technically-focused audience, recently featuring in a Wall Street Journal article and in commentary from well-known individuals. There’s also plenty of statistical evidence, in the form of Genius Bar repair figures sourced by Apple Insider, to support the widespread understanding that these keyboards suck.

But what’s missing from the numbers Apple Insider published and the general malaise about these keyboards is any understanding of the impact they’re having on otherwise-silent users. Hansson’s piece sheds some light on this, plus a poll he posted on Twitter. As of writing, over 4,600 people have responded: 38% say that their keyboard is perfect, 11% say that they had problems with the keyboard but Apple fixed it, and 51% say that they’re living with their keyboard problems.1 I’m not surprised by that — people who use their laptop a lot, especially for work, cannot just be without their computer for a week or two. It is enormously disruptive.

The thing I keep getting back to in my head is that this is a problem that should not exist. The highlight feature of the next MacBook model should be something like Face ID or being powered by one of Apple’s own kick-ass processors, not a keyboard that hasn’t regressed and now functions correctly. And I understand completely that all tech companies experiment with new and different things. In Yosemite, Apple tried to replace the fine-but-old mDNSResponder with the new-but-flaky discoveryd; that decision was reverted after a year. Apple has now been shipping MacBooks with crappy butterfly keyboards for four years.

The Apple-related story I want to read most of all right now is about how these keyboards came to be, what happened after problems began to show up, and how they kept shipping regardless. My inbox is always open.

  1. Twitter does not publish results until the poll is completed, but you can see the poll’s current state in the page’s source. ↥︎

Fifteen Million Fewer Americans Are Using Facebook Now Compared to 2017 ⇥ marketplace.org

Kimberly Adams of Marketplace interviewed Larry Rosin of Edison Research:

Kimberly Adams: In your survey you found an estimated drop of 15 million fewer Facebook users in the U.S. today than in 2017. That’s just in the U.S. Is this a meaningful drop for Facebook?

Larry Rosin: I don’t see how you couldn’t say it’s a meaningful drop. Fifteen million is a lot of people, no matter which way you cut it. It represents about 6 percent of the total U.S. population ages 12 and older. What makes it particularly important is if it is part of a trend. This is the second straight year we’ve seen this number go down. Obviously, the U.S. is the biggest market, in terms of dollars, and it’s going to be a super important market for Facebook or anybody who’s playing in this game.

[…]

Rosin: We only show trace numbers of people leaving social media altogether. They’re obviously just transferring their usage. The big gainer, interestingly, is under the same roof as Facebook. It’s their co-owned Instagram.

Facebook has insidiously covered themselves for any eventuality. They acquired Whatsapp and Instagram to ensure that ostensibly alternative choices are still Facebook’s, while in developing nations they’ve locked users into the platform, where the company is virtually synonymous with the internet as a whole.