On Safari (Matt Mullenweg edition)

Samantha Cole at 404 Media – Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos:

In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.

I cannot understand how any manager, any leader, can get themselves into a position where they believe they should redirect employee email to themselves in order to monitor who is signing up for a site of any kind. What’s almost worse is that to anyone with half an idea about human beings, it should be obvious this would do more harm than good:

One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it’s ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I’ve never questioned an employer’s judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),”

What Mullenweg – like all insecure leaders – appears to be craving isn’t an effective team, but a monoculture of people who believe in him, personally, and his vision.

“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.

Companies that have this level of leader cult fanaticism inevitably fail. And what this monoculture entails is a situation where “the emperor’s new clothes” becomes a leadership manual, not a warning:

A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."

Dave W

Dan Gillmor on Dave Winer’s 30 years of blogging:

I became a blogger because of Dave.

So, in a sense, did I. The first blogging platform I used was Radio Userland, which Dave created. I moved on to web-based blogging applications — first Blogger, I think, then Movable Type — but Radio Userland made it easy.

But my use of Dave’s software goes back even further. Back when I worked at Apple UK in the late 80s, the company had a site license for MORE, the outliner/presentation package which Dave also wrote. MORE was great because it made it super-easy to build your ideas using an outline and then turn them into something visual. It was a mile ahead of anything else, and conceptually I still prefer that method of building a presentation to the “visuals first” approach of PowerPoint.

Matt Mullenweg and WordPress Hijack the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin – Pixel Envy

It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.

Nick’s post really speaks to the level of exasperation many are feeling about this situation. The disagreement between WordPress – which means Matt Mullenweg – and WP Engine has managed to burn a huge amount of goodwill towards WordPress. You don’t get to build open-source software and use it (as Nick puts it) “as your personal weapon”.

Mullenweg’s conduct isn’t just dangerous to WordPress, it’s a danger to the entire open-source community. And what’s most worrying: he apparently can’t see it. He keeps escalating and escalating, and it will not end well for his company or for WordPress as a product.

Because I might be moving from WordPress to Micro.blog, I have imported all the posts from my main domain – so if I do switch off WordPress, nothing will be lost (although there might be a bit of redirecting to be done…)

This was probably about the time that I first discovered Linux. It looks very old-fashioned now, but at the time, GNOME was pretty comparable to Windows and (pre-OS X) macOS.

An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet • Aaron Parecki

People on blogs feel slightly less performative than people on big social networks.

Yes! This! I wonder why, though.

With the current lack of trust over Mat Mullenweg’s stewardship of WordPress, I’m investigating whether I can use Micro.blog as an alternative.

Ten Blue Links "my god, what have I done?" edition

1. Well who could possibly have seen this coming?

I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years. Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine – especially Google – is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself.

Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company. And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on “an article” as the canonical way of recommending products.

The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual. For example, the answer to “what car is right for me” has always depended on your use of it. Conversational agents using good quality data will be a better solution in the long run.

2. Turkeys, meet Christmas

Yes, I know that advertising revenue is toast, but if you are a major publisher and you’re giving OpenAI the rights to mine your content, you are silly. The sum of money they’re paying is never going to go up: and when your licensing deal ends, they will have used everything you have ever done to train a model which can recreate your style of content in seconds. Golf, as they say, clap.

3. Possible sign of the end times: I agree with DHH

David Heinemeier Hansson is not on my Christmas card list. He’s one of those techbros for whom the phrase “arrogant asshat” is entirely appropriate. But for once, I’m going to agree wholeheartedly with something he wrote: Automattic demanding a tithe from WP Engine is a violation of the ideals of open source software, reduces trust in it, and in my view shows that Matt Mullenweg’s “principles” begin and end at maintaining control over WordPress.

4. Where all the Chief Metaverse Officers gone?

Good question. My bet is the B Ark.

5. Oh boy, Roblox is toast

Where “toast” means “full of child grooming”. Ouch.

6. Quote of the week

The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. John Gruber, “Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story?

7. Elon, phone home (from Mars)

I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.) The ever-wonderful Marina Hyde, wondering what reality Musk occupies.

8. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that lovely Google would do this

Yeah no of course I’m not. Turns out that Google Pixel phones give it your location, email address and more every fifteen minutes, without consent. And no, before you say something, using an iPhone isn’t much a miracle cure.

9. This stuff matters

I could have written a WordPress special edition this time out. But I wondered if that would be too “insider baseball” for most people.

But a big chunk of the internet runs on WordPress. Publishers use it a lot. It’s become the IBM of web servers: “no one ever got fired for recommending WordPress”. And the hold-outs in the publishing space who have had their own bespoke software or used something else appear to be dwindling every year.

So WordPress matters, to a degree that few other software platforms do. It became popular in part because it was open source, so anyone could customize it and bend it to their will, and because so many people used it that it was easy to support and find developers for. It saw off semi-forgotten closed source rivals.

If you want a summary then Mathew Ingram’s article is a good place to go. Mathew has written something which encapsulates the feeling that I think many people have: profound disappointment in Mat Mullenweg’s behaviour, in his refusal to understand that being both the CEO of WordPress.com and the effective owner of WordPress.org places him in a position which needs to be handled sensitively. Using WordPress.org to attack a commercial rival of his company means it “now looks like the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.” That is unacceptable.

10. A hole is a hole

There is no such thing as a magic hole that only good guys can use”. Wendy Grossman has spent a long time pointing out that if you build a backdoor in a system to let “good guys” in law enforcement use, you’re opening the same thing for people who you would really rather not let into systems. And so it goes.

Ten Blue Links, literary salon Edition

1. Apple’s built in apps can do (almost) everything

One of the characteristics of hardcore nerdery is the tendency to over engineer your systems. People spend a lot of time creating systems, tinkering with them, making them as perfect as possible, only to abandon them a few years down the line when some new shiny hotness appears.

I’m as guilty of this as the next nerd, but at least I’m aware of my addiction. It’s one of the reasons why I have spent time avoiding getting sucked into the word of Notion, because I can see myself losing days (weeks) to tinkering, all the while getting nothing done.

That said, if you are going to create an entire workflow management system and you’re in the word of Apple, you could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of Joan Westenberg’s book and use all Apple’s first party apps. They have now got to the point where they are superficially simple, but contain a lot of power underneath.

The downside is it’s an almost certain way of trapping yourself in Apple’s ecosystem for the rest of time. Yes, Apple’s services – which lie behind the apps – use standards and have the ability to export, but not all of them, and for how long?

It’s a trade off, and from my perspective not one that really works for me right now. But if it does for you, then it’s a good option (and better than Notion).

2. Juno removed from the App Store

AKA “why I do not like any company, no matter how well intentioned, to have a monopoly on software distribution for a platform.” Christian Selig created a YouTube player for the Apple Vision Pro. It doesn’t block ads or do anything which could be regarded as dubious. But Google claimed it was using its trademarks, and Apple removed it.

Why is this problematic? Because it’s setting Apple up as a judge in a legal case. YouTube could, and should, have gone to a judge if it believed it had a legal case for trademark violation. That’s what judges are for. Instead, probably because it knew that it wouldn’t win a case like that, it went to Apple. Apple (rightly) doesn’t want to get involved in trademark disputes, so it shrugged and removed the app.

This extra-legal application of law is one of the most nefarious impacts of App Store monopolies. And if it continues to be allowed, it will only get worse.

3. The horrible descent of Matt Mullenweg

You will be aware of the conflict between WordPress — by which we mean Matt Mullenweg, because according to Matt he is WordPress — and WPEngine. I have many opinions on this which I will, at some point, get down to writing. The most important one is simple: if you make an open source product under the GPL, you don’t get to dictate to anyone how they use it and don’t get to attempt to punish them for not contributing “enough”. Heck, you don’t get to decide what “enough” looks like.

The whole thing has brought out the worst in Mullenweg, as evidenced in his attacks on Kellie Peterson. Peterson, who is a former Automattic employee, offered to help anyone leaving WordPress find opportunities. Mullenweg decided this was attacking him, and claimed this was illegal. I don’t know about you, but when a multi-millionaire starts to throw around words like “tortuous interference” I pay attention.

As with many of that generation of California ideologists Mullenweg appears to have decided that he knows best, now and always. Yes, private equity companies that use open source projects and contribute nothing back are douchebags, but they’re douchebags who are doing something that the principles of open source explicitly allow them to do. Mullenweg’s apparent desire to be the emperor of WordPress is worrying.

4. OpenAI raises money, still isn’t a business

Ed Zitron wrote an excellent piece this week on the crazy valuation and funding round which OpenAI just closed, pointing out that (1) ChatGPT loses money on every customer, and (2) there is no way to use scale to change this: the company is going to keep losing money on every customer as models get more compute-hungry. Neither Moore’s Law nor the economies of scale which made cloud services of the past profitable are going to come riding to the rescue.

I think Ed’s right — and it’s important to note, as Satya Nadella did, that LLMs are moving into the “commodity” stage — but one other thing to note is that many of the more simple things which people use LLMs for are being pushed from cloud to edge. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is one example of this, but Microsoft is also pushing a lot of the compute down to the device level in the ARM-based Copilot PCs.

This trend should alleviate some of the growth issues that OpenAI has, but it’s a double-edged sword because it makes it less likely that someone will need to use ChatGPT, and so even less likely to need to pay OpenAI.

5. Why I love Angela Carter

I think I first read Angela Carter during my degree, one of the few books that I bothered to read for my literature modules1. This piece includes possibly my favourite quote from her: “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”

And the point is: sometimes it’s fine not to be subtle. Sometimes it’s fine to be overblown. Sometimes the story demands it, like a steak needs to be juicy.

6. And speaking of writers I love

I can’t tell you enough to just go and read M John Harrison. Climbers is sometimes regarded as his best novel, and this essay on why it’s the best book written about 21st century male loneliness despite being written in 1989 captures a lot of it. I like the line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction: “To Harrison, all life is alien”. Amen to that.

7. No really this week is all lit, all the time

Olivia Laing is another writer that makes me salivate when I read her. Like Harrison and Carter, her prose is as good as her fiction, and her recent book The Garden Against Time – an account of restoring a garden to glory – is one of the best yet. If you need any further persuading, you should read this piece in the New Yorker.

8. Down in Brighton? Like books?

Next weekend is the best-named literary festival in the world down in Brighton. The Coast is Queer includes loads of brilliant sessions including queer fantastical reimaginings, the incredible Julia Armfield on world building, Juno Dawson’s trans literary salon, and the unmissable David Hoyle. I’m going, you should go.

9. Harlan the terrible

Like Cory Doctorow, I grew up worshipping Harlan Ellison. And like Cory, as I’ve grown older I have see that Harlan was an incredibly complicated person. Cory has written a great piece (masquerading as just one part of a linkblog) which not only looks at Harlan, warts and all, but also talks about the genesis of the story he contributed to the – finally finished! – Last Dangerous Visions.

10. Argh Mozilla wai u doo this?

No Mozilla, no, online advertising does not need “improving… through product and infrastructure”. Online advertising needs to understand that surveillance-based ads were always toxic and the whole thing needs to be torn up. I agree with Jamie Zawinski: Mozilla should be “building THE reference implementation web browser, and being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.”

To be clear: I think Mozilla’s goals are laudable, in the sense that at the moment the choice for people is either accept being tracked to a horrendous degree or just block almost every ad and tracker. But you can’t engineer your way around the advertising industry’s rapacious desire for data. It’s that industry which needs to change, not the technology.


  1. I read a lot, I just didn’t read a lot that was actually on the syllabus. ↩︎

Ten Blue Links “reinventing drink ordering” Edition

1. Inventing the future

If there is a book about Apple, I have probably read it. On my first day working at the company in 1989 I was given the obligatory copy of then-CEO John Sculley’s Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple. After that, I devoured as much as I could. 

I don’t think I have read a book like John Buck’s Inventing the Future, though. It’s getting on for 500 pages of interviews, history and anecdotes about Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and I highly recommend it if you want to hear stories which haven’t been told before about Apple. I really wish it had an index, but it’s still well worth the money.

2. Apple’s web video mojo

Durig a conversation about Apple QuickTime, Kevin Marks pointed me at this article he wrote back in 2006 on why the company was losing its web video mojo. Kevin was right then – Apple could have owned web video – and someone really needs to sit down and write the history of that part of the company’s story. How did they mess up? As Kevin puts it “they invented pop-up web ads, and put one in before playing any web QT movie to sell the 'Pro' version of the player. They crippled the QT Player to remove the editing features unless you paid - even for the Mac users who had had the benefit before.” A lesson for today’s Apple, too.

3. Future is cleaning house

IMore, the 16 year old site which was born in the wake of the iPhone, is to close down. It’s not the only one of Future’s tech brands to be shuttered: AnandTech, the technology brand which had one of the best reputations in the world, is also going although its archive will stay online for the foreseeable future. I’m not surprised – while both sites were well regarded, they were not a great fit for the affiliate-led strategy that Future has been pursuing for many years (where it was ahead of most publishers). 

4. “Pray we don’t alter the deal further”

One of the reasons I loathe – and I really do mean that – the current generation of tech giants is their ability to lock down markets for software and pull the rug out from under existing application developers. The latest example is iA, which has effectively killed off the Android version of its wonderful writing app iA Writer after Google changed the rules regarding letting applications access Google Drive. “In order to get our users full access to their Google Drive on their devices, we now needed to pass a yearly CASA (Cloud Application Security Assessment) audit. This requires hiring a third-party vendor like KPMG.” Yes, that’s right: pay an auditor maybe a couple of months of revenue in order to access cloud storage. But it’s not just Google: Apple has the same control, as iA point out in a footnote.

5. Halide rejected from the App Store

No really, it’s not just Google. After seven years, and despite being featured in the iPhone 16 keynote, an update to Halide was rejected from Apple’s App Store because its permissions prompt wasn’t explicit enough that the app, which is a camera app and takes pictures, was in fact a camera app which takes pictures. Apple admitted this was a mistake, but how many “mistakes” never get corrected because the app isn’t high profile enough to get the right level of attention?

6. Why this blog will be moving soon

I’m not a massive fan of WP Engine as a company, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a WordPress host for a bunch of small reasons, but I have no doubt at all that Matt Mullenweg’s apparent crusade against them is one of the hollowest and most disingenuous set of complaints I have seen in a long time. Pulling the rug out from users getting security updates is an unforgiveable move. 

This blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and I don’t particularly want to move back to self-hosting WordPress. Anyone got any recommendations?

7. Return to work and die

I mean, literally die. For four days. With no one noticing. 

8. Remember the TouchPad?

This one is a definite trip down memory lane: The HP TouchPad was a WebOS tablet that had many of the attributes necessary to compete with the iPad, and yet was dumped by HP 49 days after its release. And I had completely forgotten that Russell Brand did an advert for it. Oh boy.

9. Cosmic Alpha 2

COSMIC DE has moved into alpha 2. If you don’t know about it, it’s a new Linux desktop environment which has been created as part of the next big upgrade to PopOS, the distribution created by computer maker System76 for its range of machine. I’m using it on my ThinkPad, and – so far at least – it's been stable and very usable considering its alpha status. I’ve seen release versions of open source products be less stable. I might write something longer about my experience of Cosmic DE as I use it more.

10. Douchebros want to ruin bars, now

Sometimes I really wish that the idea of “disruption” in business had never been invented, because it really does attract some of the worst ideas. Case in point: disrupting queuing for a drink in a bar. No. Just no.

Ten Blue Links, "Turn to the left" edition

QuickTime

My first look at QuickTime came before it was publicly released. I was working at Apple in IS&T in 1990, and we had a session one afternoon showing everyone the world of the future. Of course, Knowledge Navigator took pride of place, but also shown off was an early version of a revolutionary new multimedia technology which would allow you to play video, in real time, in colour, on your Mac. QuickTime.

I was also there for the launch of QuickTime 3.0 in 1998, although all I remember of that event was the use of Sarah McLachlan’s Building a Mystery video (possibly one of the most 90s pieces of film ever made).

And, in 2001, on the top floor of the Dennis Publishing office I sat in the corner and tried to work as on screen a postage-stamp sized QuickTime video showed me a live feed of first one then two planes hitting the World Trade Center. A handful of years before the towers had been beacons as a train swung into New York, bringing me from Boston to Manhattan and into the best city in the world for the very first time. Even at QuickTime size, I felt like I was watching a friend take their last breath.

QuickTime, then, is woven through many memories for me. Anyway, Howard Oakley has written a brief history of it, and as a technology it probably deserves more. As a carrier of memory, it definitely means more to me.

2. Go to your room!

Sooner or later, your parents tell you to clean up your room. While Apple is now a middle aged company its recent descent into teenage tantrum behaviour has finally caused the EU to lose patience, ground it, and demand it thinks about its future conduct.

3. Editing vs accreting

Me and John Gruber have our disagreements but I couldn’t agree more with almost everything in his article on the difference between Tim Cook’s Apple and Steve Jobs’ Apple. I would compare Jobs to a brilliant magazine editor, pulling together and inspiring creative people while also editing: taking out what it’s needed to tell the story. Cook, on the other hand, is someone who accretes, who adds on more stuff in order to build.

4. No, Larry, no

Larry Ellison has always had an interesting reputation in Silicon Valley. Extraordinarily rich after Oracle became the data foundation of almost everything in the world, Ellison has a kind of noxiously playful arrogance. One of the most stomach-turning episodes of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs hagiography involves Ellison and Jobs playing a prank call on an Apple fan, first offering him a job, then laughingly turning down the poor sap. It’s gross. And it’s very Ellison.

With great money comes great stupidity, and it’s worth considering that as context when you read about Ellison’s view that pervasive surveillance cameras will bring world peace, or something. A man so divorced from a world which doesn’t involved super yachts, billionaire friends and the ability to buy as many Miata’s as you want (if you know, you know) is not someone that the world should listen to about the future.

5. Where the iPad ends

I don’t think there is a device which divides opinion more than the iPad. I see this in myself: there are days when I absolutely love my iPad Pro and everything that it represents. A device which can transform into anything you want it to be, that’s simple to use, that has a screen which is better than anything you own. And then there are days when I hate it. Not because of how it works, but because the degree of control over the experience of computing which it represents is an antithesis of many of my values.

But. There’s something about it, and I think this archive article by Tim Bajarin from the iPad’s tenth anniversary on the device’s influence is worth reading. How pervasive is the iPad’s influence now? In some senses, the use of ARM and amazing displays which are clearly the direction that computers are going in probably represents its deepest impact so far. Yes, touch screens are common in the Windows world, but slate-style computers haven’t really taken off in the way they should have. I’m still typing this on a Mac, after all.

6. Engagement bait

Been on Threads lately? You’ll have noticed that the main feed is a torrent of engagement bait. Of course you can switch to look at just the people you follow, but Meta makes every effort to pull you back into the “For You” feed, which shows you what appears to be a random mix of stupid questions and inane comments, written by people who pull on engagement like lungs pull on air.

Similarly, anecdote from the blue side of the Meta empire notes the home feed in Facebook is now showing more and more “content” from pages, groups and pretty much anything except the people you want to see: your friends and family, the ones you love, and an occasional cute dachshund.

Why, though? Speculating wildly, I think both Threads and the Facebook home feed represent a desperate bid for novelty. The action in terms of keeping you in touch with the people you’re close to has moved elsewhere, into different kinds of messenger application both private (iMessage, WhatsApp) and semi-public (Telegram). What’s left for Facebook? Pictures of old dogs?

And Threads is attempting to defining itself as “not Twitter”, while also trying to appeal to the same kinds of core influencers – journalists, those who aren’t visual enough for Insta. What better way to win than rigging the game towards a stream of infinite engagement bait?

7. Death to all Word

It’s 11 years since Charlie Stross wrote about how he hated Microsoft Word. It’s still a great read, and Charlie’s point – that until Microsoft Word dies, it’s unavoidable – remains as sound as ever.

8. You put the Lime in the coconut

I love electric bikes. I own one, and it’s got me back into cycling. So I’m in favour of people using them. But… well, is it just me or do techbros ruin everything? In this case, Lime and other e-bike rental companies are essentially creating fat rideable litter across areas to such a degree that local authorities want them banned, and local residents want them crushed. The bikes, not the techbros. Although hey, if that’s what the people want…

9. Fashion

It’s an unlikely thing for a boy from Derby, part of the post-industrial hinterland that is the East Midlands, to love fashion. But I always have. I think it was fashion that first made me love magazines, the heft and visual delight of something like Vogue. When I became an editor of a magazine which, while a tech mag, was also read by a huge number of creative people in design, it was probably the best job I ever had – even if I didn’t know it at the time.

I still love magazines, which is why I absolutely adored “In Vogue: The 90s”, a documentary about the eponymous magazine and the the era that made me. Highly recommended.

10. Art for art’s sake

I spent five years working on a PhD thesis titled The implications of Kant’s philosophy of mind for artificial intelligencein the early 90s, when cognitive science – that blend of philosophy, computing and psychology - was probably at its academic height. But like Kant, my interests in philosophy were broad, and I spent a chunk of my time in both medical ethics and the philosophy of art. The paper I presented to the conservators of the V&A on analogies from principles in medical ethics is long lost, but I’m glad that my comparison of the principle of dignity in death being more important than the relentless preservation of life with conservation of art works didn’t stick too heavily in anyone’s mind.

I’ve realised lately quite how much a blend of technology, art and design has influenced my working practice. I’m not an artist – words are the only medium that I have ever found which I have any talent at – but I love art, and artists, and design, and designers. I love how they see the world.

That’s probably why I love this interview with Jenny Saville much. Saville is one of those artists whose work you would instantly recognise, but whose face you might not remember. And in particular, I love this quote:

When I paint, I don’t search for beauty, but for the power of life’s force: when you fall in love with someone, it's life’s force. When you see amazing food or you listen to music that goes right inside your body, that’s life’s force. That moment is not an intellectual space, it's something beyond – you can't articulate it. It’s about the moments that help you breathe deeper.

That’s a good one to ponder on.

Ten Blue Links, “hell of a lot of Apple here, Ian” edition

1. Oh was there some new Apple stuff?

Apparently there was. I didn’t get chance to watch the keynote live — I was in Amsterdam for a conference — but the only thing that really stood out for me when I saw it later was the feature for AirPods Pro which allows them to function as a proper hearing aid. My old ears will thank Apple for it (and so will my bank manager, as I won’t have to spend around £1,000 on something I don’t need most of the time).

2. Private cloud compute

And speaking of new Apple stuff, I’m actually pretty impressed with the way that Apple has implemented its private cloud compute system. Yeah, I know, AI is evil and all that.

3. How an iPhone screen repair led to a social media ban

However, back in the world of older Apple stuff, this whole story is likely to make your jaw hit the floor. After Apple replaced Finn Voorhees’ iPhone screen, they found when trying to log into Snapchat they got a an “SS06: Device Banned” error message. It turned out that the phone Finn got was a refurb (which should be fine) but that the previous owner had been banned from the service – and Snapchat uses a little-known feature to lock out not only the user, but the device if someone is banned. Unfortunately this device ban flag persists even if the phone is factory reset.

4. The new Reeder

One of the things which keeps pulling back to using the Mac, iPad and iPhone is thethird party developer ecosystem. This, of course, is one of the reasons why I end up getting angry at Apple for wanting their pound of flesh from every developer. It’s not the Mac that keeps me on the Mac. It’s the developers. Apple should be paying them, not the other way round.

Anyway, Reeder has been one of my favourite Mac and iOS applications for a long time. It’s an RSS reader (the clue is in the name) that’s a beautiful piece of design.

Silvio Rizzo, its author, has rebuilt the app from the ground up to change its focus and, as he puts it, make it something that’s “rebuilt for today”.

What does that mean? The starting point is that the way we get information is no longer all about RSS. In fact, we get feeds from social media, from YouTube, from podcasts, and many other places.

So Reeder now supports all of the above, putting everything into a single feed. It’s still a lovely design, but I suspect this approach won’t be for everyone. It reminds me of the “river of news” concept that Dave Winer was talking about more than a decade ago. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I am going to give it a go.

5. iA Writer keeps getting better

Information Architects – iA – are one of my favourite developer teams. Not only do they produce great apps, they’re good people too. iA Writer, which was their first and flagship product, is the best distraction-free Markdown writing application that exists.

But it’s had one small weakness which means I don’t use it for as much as I would want: it’s not really designed to handle long-form articles made up from smaller pieces, whether that’s a novel or book-length project of just something composed from small parts. It can do transclusion in writing, and that’s a useful feature, but it’s not quite what I need.

A case in point: although the tools I use to write these linkblog posts vary, I often use Ulysses for it. I will write each of the ten blue links in a separate document, allowing me to go as short or long as I want without distraction. Then I just number them, move them into the right order, and publish direct to Wordpress.

I can’t quite do that with iA Writer — yet. I could create each document separately, but in order to make a single document which I could publish in one click, I would have to create a document, use the transclusion feature to “insert” all the elements, and publish it. It’s just a little less elegant than the same process on Ulysses.

The good news is that it’s moving closer to having the right tools for the job. The latest version includes a “tree view” for files in its sidebar, making it significantly easier to structure texts. I’m really looking forward to what they do next.

6. One for the book pile

This looks like essential reading: an amazing collection of interview and anecdotes from the hackers and nerds who made all the most amazing Apple technology (via Nick Heer, where I get a lot of my best links from.)

7. Ice. Ice. Baby

When the wonderful Mac menu bar app Bartender was sold there was a little bit of concern that the new owner wouldn’t, perhaps, be the best steward for it. But if you want an app to manage all the clutter in your menubar then look no further than Ice. Not only is it really good, it’s also open source. Recommended.

8. Spamming the regulator

Look this is nerdy as hell, but you know I love a little bit of light reading about competition law. This paper looks at a new tactic from big companies who are under investigation for antitrust violation: gathering together so many thousands of pages of evidence and expert testimony that the case either becomes logjammed forever, or the regulator and judges can’t properly evaluate the evidence.

9. Rage bait on Threads

It’s a problem. For me Threads is mostly unusable junk because the “For you” view is swamped by engagement bait and nonsense. I’m happy that mostly I can now follow the people I want to follow who are only active on Threads from my Mastodon account, but I would love for Meta to actually realise this is a problem and engage with it. The service will go down the toilet pretty fast if it doesn’t.

10. America’s best paid CEOs have the worst paid employees

I’m sure this is a complete coincidence and the money will trickle down Real Soon Now.

Hospitals

I have always felt at home in hospitals. As a small child, my mother - a psychiatric nurse - would take me to work with her on Wednesdays, to collect her wages. Back then your wage was weekly, and came in an envelope full of actual money, rather than direct into a bank.

Often she would leave me on my own in the hospital canteen, where a range of old or mentally ill people would cop over me and make sure I was fine. I think explains a lot about why I am comfortable around the old, the infirm, the unusual.

Even now the smell of hospitals brings back those childhood memories. Even after years of spending time visiting first dad, then mum, then Kim’s parents, a hospital feels like part of home. Somewhere safe.

"Ireland doesn't want the money"

John Gruber on the EU ruling that Apple owes 13bn euro in taxes to Ireland:

Ireland doesn’t want the money... What a great win for Margrethe Vestager, making clear to the world that the EU is hostile to successful companies. Good job.

Ireland has long had a reputation as, effectively, an in-EU tax haven -- one which walked very close to the line of EU and international law And the country has been especially "favourable" to large tech companies. As the Irish Independent notes:

The Government continues to claim there was no special treatment for Apple, and these were all ­merely legitimate tax exemptions. The ECJ says otherwise, with its final judgment: “Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid, which Ireland is required to recover.” The judges ruled that Apple’s two units incorporated in Ireland enjoyed favourable tax treatment compared with resident companies taxed in Ireland that were not capable of benefiting from such advance rulings by the tax authorities here. A rotten deal, indeed.

And the Irish government itself has long known that its sweetheart deals weren't up to international standards:

As finance minister from 2017, Paschal Donohoe wisely started a process of bringing Irish rules into line – including rolling back the IP reliefs – and eventually signed up to the new OECD corporate tax deal.

Ironically -- and counter to John's point -- the conversation in Ireland is already about how to use the windfall from Apple to invest in infrastructure which will help maintain its position as a hub in the EU for tech businesses:

And then there is what Ireland can – and cannot – offer. Promises – about clean energy, top-class education, abundant water and so on – count for little now. The State has the resources to address this, helped by another €14 billion which will soon be resting in our account. But the question investors are asking is whether Ireland can actually deliver.

It's not just tax, of course. Ireland has also been recognised as the most lax data protection regime in Europe, so much so that the EDPB was forced to step in and make the Irish DPA enforce its own rules against Meta. John's reaction to that case was a little different.

Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

I could – and probably should – write an entire essay about the cult of the founder in Silicon Valley, how it developed and the damage it has done. This article from Dave Karpf, though, encapsulates some of my own thinking. Contrasting Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman – both members of the first Ycombinator cohort – is such an interesting approach.

But the other reason why the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have. But he’s never actually run, or even been in a senior leadership role, in a large company.

There’s a key paragraph in his essay which I think shows this:

Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
If you are hiring "professional fakers" that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don't always hire great people. And even good leaders don't have a 100% hit rate (John Browett anybody?). As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.

Another tell on Graham’s lack of experience in this area: his lack of knowledge that companies other than Steve Jobs' Apple run annual retreats for the 100 most influential people, regardless of level. As Karpf notes, many companies do this. Heck, I have been part of retreats like that even at old-school publishing companies.

But if you have never worked in large companies, and you have the kind of founder myopia that Graham has, you wouldn’t know that.

I think Dave gets it right when he connects founder mode with other Silicon Valley craziness:

This is all of a piece with Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto and Balaji Srinivasan’s bat shit bitcoin declarations. A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, exceptional, and that the problem with society these days is that people keep treating them like everyone else.
I think all this also relates to a post on Threads by Neil Cybart:
One thing I have noticed is that some people in tech (writers, journalists, etc.) are becoming tired. Seems like it started around the pandemic. They have lost interest. However, they think the issue is Big Tech becoming boring instead of themselves. A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech. I think we are going to see that play out in the coming years.
I have been thinking about Neil's post a lot since I read it (always the sign of a good post!), in part because I too have felt bored by tech. Given that I have been fascinated by tech for almost the whole of my life, that has felt like a pretty odd place to be, mentally.

But I don’t think it’s that people themselves are getting boring: it’s that the landscape and characters in tech coverage have become more one dimensional. The hype cycle driven by characters like Graham often feels like you are being bludgeoned around the head if you’re not “all in” on crypto, or the metaverse, or LLMs, or whatever.

And the personalities – and tech is, and always has been, as much about people as things – are cartoon villains/heroic founders (delete as appropriate) who live in a bubble of their own. Musk, Graham, Altman… you name it.

Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. As Dave Karpf rightly identifies, the hacker has vanished from the scene, to be replaced by an endless array of know-nothing hero founders whose main superpower is the ability to bully subordinates (and half of Twitter) into believing they are always right.

Where the hackers exist, they are either buried in the depths of big companies (does Johny Srouji ever leave that pristine basement?) or working on interesting but niche open source projects, often involving writing yet another text editor.

In allowing and encouraging the likes of Graham to define what tech looks like, we have made tech look boring, unless you are the kind of teenage who dreams of getting rich quick by starting a company, riding a hype cycle, and flipping it to some sucker for a few hundred million.

I doubt that commentators who love technology are bored with tech. But I do think we are bored with blow hards like Graham being the centre of attention, of hype cycles, and of huge corporations that are more interested in boosting revenues through digging moats and buying off potential competition.

Perhaps what Neil is detecting isn’t boredom, but dismay. If you lived through the excitement of the 80s and 90s, and the web optimism of the 00s, it’s difficult to look at people like Graham – people who aren’t as bright as they think they are – and get excited about the future of the industry.

Why do people get the history of Apple so wrong?

Dave Winer (who really should know better):

Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy water
Sculley ultimately ran out of steam, but in the time he was at Apple he also took it from an $800m company to an $8bn one. Meanwhile, Jobs was back in founder mode at NeXT where, having taken some of Apple’s best people with him, he created a computer that no one wanted to buy and an operating system that remarkably few people installed.

The Steve Jobs who went back to Apple was a different person from the one that left it, chastened by the experience of business failure. It’s an interesting question of parallel history but my thought is that had Jobs won the battle and remained CEO rather than Sculley, the kind of mistakes that he made with NeXT would have probably lead to Apple suffering the same fate as most of the early computer makers who didn’t move to DOS/Windows.

DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies

A 1600, a group of English merchants were granted a royal charter, a legal document which allowed them to venture to foreign lands and seek trade. This was a big bet: not only were the territories they aimed to trade in a long way from England, dangerous to get to and occupied by people who didn't necessarily welcome English traders, but they had to invest £68,000 in the venture -- about £9m in today's money. For a period of 15 years, the royal charter granted them a monopoly on trade.1

The venture was the East India Company, later the British East India Company. By the mid-1700s, it accounted for half the entire world's trade. By 1858 it had a private army that was twice as big as Britain's, and ruled over the whole of what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. That £68,000 bought its investors -- and Britain -- the biggest ROI the world has ever seen. The company turned a fifteen-year monopoly into an empire. If you want to understand the obsession that the Brexit-wrangling mouth breathers have with "Buccaneering Britain", look no further than the folk memory of the British East India Company.

This often comes to mind when I'm thinking about our modern technology monopolies. Like them, the East India Company founders took big risks – in fact, bigger risks than the likes of Mark Zuckerberg can ever conceive (no Facebook employee has, to my knowledge, been killed by cannon fire, even if, like the East India Company, their products have helped enable genocide).

Unlike those 17th century investors, the founders of modern monopolies are constrained by law rather than explicitly encouraged by it. We have, collectively, decided that there should be limits on the amount of wealth accumulated which monopolists are allowed to enjoy, and there should be limits to the power of corporations. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Google will, it's safe to bet, never be allowed a private army and the rulership of a big chunk of a continent.

In modern capitalism, taking risks brings rewards -- but only so far. And a dominant position, no matter how well-deserved, does not allow you the leeway to eradicate competition itself.

All this came to mind when reading Ben Thompson on the DOJ Investigating Nvidia:

Nvidia under Huang did everything we hope our greatest companies will do: they had a long-term vision, they innovated relentlessly to find new markets and applications for industry-leading technology, and when a world-changing opportunity presented itself with large language models, they were ready to take advantage of it, for a long-term benefit that may forever be unmeasurable. This is the behaviour our government apparently wants to punish?

Earlier this week, I listened to a great interview with Ben about on how he writes, which I highly recommend. In it, he noted his dislike of writing about antitrust:

“The one time I did almost burnout is like 2019, 2020. I was writing about regulation and antitrust and congressional hearings. And I'm like, oh, this is actually horrible. Like it's burning me out. I work a lot. That's not what's burning me out. It's writing about stuff that is kind of soul sucking for me from my perspective.”

I can tell Ben doesn't like writing about this stuff2, in part because I think he keeps missing a foundational point about antitrust: What's perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.

I'm not going to attempt to evaluate the merits of the DOJ case, in part because at present there is no case. Per Bloomberg:

"The US Justice Department sent subpoenas to Nvidia Corp. and other companies as it seeks evidence that the chipmaker violated antitrust laws, an escalation of its investigation into the dominant provider of AI processors. The DOJ, which had previously delivered questionnaires to companies, is now sending legally binding requests that oblige recipients to provide information, according to people familiar with the investigation. That takes the government a step closer to launching a formal complaint."

Seeking information about a company's conduct is precisely what the DoJ should be doing in any area where a dominant player is emerging, and the earlier it does that, the easier it becomes to make a case which has an actual impact. No one seriously doubts that Nvidia is now dominant in the market for AI processors. Is "AI processors" a market? Has Nvidia's conduct stepped over the line from tough competition to abuse of a market position? These are elements that an investigation should try to find out.

What the DOJ is clearly signalling, here, is it won't allow dominance to be abused even when companies have only recently crossed the line from being a competitor to dominance. Given the speed at which technology companies can distort markets and crush competition when they achieve dominance (who remembers DR-DOS?) this feels like a sensible approach. The other option -- giving businesses 10–20 years of the ability to destroy competitors not through making the best products but by sheer force of accumulated power -- has demonstrably stifled competition. And competition drives innovation (at least in theory).

Ben's best argument is that Nvidia has done nothing wrong, and in fact has done what we want companies to do: make long-term, industry - changing and fundamentally risky bets to achieve huge returns. And I agree! There is no doubt that Nvidia deserves the billions of dollars in profits it will make from being the biggest and best player in AI processors. The lead it has created from the investments it made will last for a long time, and generate a lot of money. Jensen Huang deserves all the credit he gets, and as many sharp black leather jackets as he cares to wear.

For anyone who has grown up in the era of the hero/founder and "startup in a garage" vision of Silicon Valley, I think it's a compelling view. Apple is another example. Under Steve Jobs, they made a series of "bet the company" product launches, culminating in the iPhone. They created a platform which over a billion people use globally, spending tens of billions of dollars a year on apps. Don't they deserve 30% of that, forever?

But one of the principles of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was that success has to be continually earned. Andy Grove, who knew a thing or two about it, warned against "the inertia of success" because, even if you are at the top, you don't deserve anything unless you keep innovating, keep creating the best products. "Only the paranoid survive" because somewhere out there, a smaller, more nimble competitor is coming to eat you – and all your past success will not save you from that fate.

A company getting it right does not give it some kind of permanent licence to coast while printing money. The question that all antitrust seeks to answer is simple: how much is enough? When do the well-deserved riches and power that accumulate to companies that make big bets, execute well, and invest wisely start to be toxic for society or humanity as a whole, and for competition itself? Are the riches that the largest companies make earned, or are they simply the product of being large? If it's the former, great! But if it's the latter…

The founders of the British East India company also did everything we hope our greatest companies will do: they had a long-term vision, they innovated relentlessly to find new markets, and when a world-changing opportunity presented itself, they were ready to take advantage of it, for a long-term detriment that may forever be unmeasurable. Sometimes, enough just is enough.

Ten Blue Links, “I was a teenage anarchist” edition

1. Model collapse isn’t just for AI

When a large language model starts to ingest a lot of content written by either itself or other large language models, it falls into what’s called model collapse: a state where, like a snake eating its own tail, it no longer makes sense. 

Back when I was working on the philosophy of AI in the 1990s, one of the strands of study was using computers to understand human behaviour by creating models and seeing if the quirks of us meat sacks would emerge from the model. And I would argue that model collapse is one of these quirks. If the information you are exposed to is limited to an echo chamber, then you see the same kind of behaviour in people.

Unfortunately – but predictably – the “super-smart” Silicon Valley billionaires are just as susceptible to model collapse as either an LLM or every other human. Only, unlike most people (and most LLMs) the damage they can do because of this model collapse is actually enormous. Musk, Andreessen, Thiel and the rest have created a model of the world which bears no relation to reality, but unfortunately, they have it in their power to influence the world so it matches their views. 

2. RIP AnandTech

At its height, AnandTech was the best site around for deep, highly researched reviews of significant products. As such, it was an outlier as technology product writing moved to an affiliate-based revenue model which focused on lists of potential options for purchase. It had more akin to the technology publishing landscape that I learned the trade in, where products were tested (occasionally to destruction) in labs by people who focused on devising ever more fiendish methods of working out how a product would perform in the real world. 

I’m sad to see it go, but at least it doesn’t have to suffer the same fate as so many other sites which have simply been used as fodder for boosting the SEO rankings of lesser brands. 

3. Monoculture is mono failure

Diversity, as anyone smart knows, is strength. That applies to farming. It applies to organisations. And it applies to platforms. Diversity protects you from the impact of monocultures, which inevitably contain the seeds of their own downfall.

And yet, the technological systems we currently have implicitly rewarded monocultures, monopolies and monopsonies. Wherever you look, from hardware systems to social media platforms to online retailing, we are creating failure points through a lack of diversity. CrowdStrike is just the latest example, but 21st century capitalism’s addiction to the Highlander Principle (“there can be only one!”) is going to present some profound problems over the next few decades. Assuming of course we survive them at all…

4. I just wish Bluesky was actually a federated system

Bluesky, the “not Twitter” that isn’t either Mastodon or Threads, has seen an influx of users from both Britain and now Brazil as people become more and more annoyed with Elon Musk. But it’s also been focusing on some fascinating approaches to content moderation and protecting users. The latest is the ability, if a post of yours is quoted, to “decouple” the post from the quote – effectively stopping in its tracks one commonly used method of abuse, the “quote tweet pile-on”. 

I still don’t like that it’s not, yet, truly federated: you can’t run your own server, and even if you use a name based on your own domain you can’t move servers no matter what. But I like that they are experimenting with different options. 

5. JISC leaving Twitter

And speaking of leaving Twitter, JISC announced it would be ceasing activity on there. The organisation is “the UK digital, data and technology agency focused on tertiary education, research and innovation”, a non-profit which drives digital transformation in education in the UK. It’s a big deal that it no longer believes being active on Twitter is in alignment with its values. 

6. The NeXT IPO that never happened

Via Michael Tsai, this is not only a great little potted history of NeXT, the company that effectively did a reverse takeover of Apple (and ruined my 30th birthday), but also reveals that it was at one point planning an IPO. The thing that made an IPO possible wasn’t the hardware (NeXT was out of that market) or NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. Instead it was WebObjects, the web development platform which made creating complex dynamic sites much more easy than before. At the beginnings of the Dotcom boom, this was a major potential business. 

Extra bonus fact: Dell apparently used WebObjects to create its online store in just four weeks. That, at the time, was incredible. 

7. Moof!

If you know, you know

8. Starship Stormtroopers

I was far too young to read New Worlds magazine, but by my early teens I had moved on from Tolkien to Michael Moorcock, borrowing the Dorian Hawkmoon and Corum Jhaelen Irsei series from the local library and being absolutely amazed by the sheer muscularity of the writing. At some point – and I can’t remember where I found it – I read Moorcock’s “Starship Stormtroopers” essay on the fascistic nature of much of the Science Fiction canon, and that was it: my life – and my politics – changed for good. I became a teenage anarchist.

I’m not sure if I am still one today (the teenage bit, definitely not) but I occasionally reread the essay, just to remind myself that it’s OK Not To Like Frank Herbert.

9. The best novel about 21st Century male loneliness

The second of the holy trinity of New Worlds writers that changed my view of fiction was, of course, M John Harrison. There’s an argument to be made that Harrison is our best living writer, although I’m sure that he would hate anyone for making it. Harrison was unique at the time for not allowing genre to dictate what he should write, and Climbers, his 1989 novel about rock climbing in Yorkshire, saw him walk a long way out of science fiction without breaking a step. It’s a brilliant book, and I was really pleased to see this article which argues that it’s also become the definitive novel about 21st century male loneliness

And I think it’s right: part of the impact of our relationships moving from primarily face to face to being mediated by the internet is, as Sherry Turkle put it, that we are alone together. In that sense, it mirrors the mental state of going climbing, which is a social activity done primarily in solitude. 

10. Ignorance of your (global) culture is not considered cool

I think of myself as pretty well-educated. But I didn’t understand the role that India played in essentially creating the numbering system which we all used – I, like most, thought it originated with Arab mathematicians. 

But it didn’t, and the forthcoming book by William Dalrymple about how India changed the world got ordered quickly once I read this article. And it is, as Dalrymple notes, ironic that the innovations in banking, accounting and business enabled by the Indian system of numbers when it reached the west did so much to create the financial muscle which allowed Europe to ultimately subjugate India. After all, it was “the East India Company – run from the City of London by merchants and accountants, with their ledgers and careful accounting – that ran amok and seized and subjugated a fragmented and divided India in what was probably the supreme act of corporate violence in history.”

Ten Blue Links, "Cthulhu lives!" edition

1. The smartest comment you will read about AI and art this week

From the wonderful Laurie Anderson, about an AI version of her late husband, Lou Reed: “I mean, people might have black-and-white photographs of their grandparents or even a VR representation, but nothing can capture these people. They’re dead. I like what the Dalai Lama said about an artificial flower being as good as a real flower, because it reminds you of the real one. I’ve done versions of Lou’s voice and Lou’s writing made from AI trained on his work. It’s not Lou but it reminds me of Lou. It’s about the reminding of how you feel about that person.”

2. There’s definitely a German compound word for this

What is a remembrance of futures which never happened called? This article about an edition of Saturday Review World which looked at the world of 2024 from the perspective of 1974 includes quotes from Wernher von Braun, Neil Armstrong and many others. I would love a copy.

3. Your occasional reminder that macOS malware exists

And this one is a data stealer, called — and I am not making this up — “Cthulhu Stealer”. You can’t get more scary than a bit of Cthulhu.

4. Adversarial interoperability made the computer we know and love

Every time I set yet another account of how antitrust is “stifling innovation” I am going to send this article to its author. Adversarial interoperability made the PC possible, stopped Microsoft completely owning all office documents, and helped save Apple. And now, thanks to extensions to IP law, it’s more than a little broken.

5. File under the dumb stuff that happens in app stores

Application developer makes a piece of software which allows people to use their existing account with Digital Ocean to do a cool thing. Apple nopes it because Digital Ocean isn’t paying them a cut of all their revenue, although the app isn’t made by Digital Ocean. Rent seeking, much?

6. Are we the baddies?

And speaking of Apple, this article sums up how, I think, many people are feeling about the company these days – folks who in the past would have not only been fans of the products, but also been evangelists for the way the company was different to the rest. This paragraph, in particular: “But another part is that despite achieving massive success, Apple continues to make decisions that put it at odds with the community that used to tirelessly advocate for them. They antagonize developers by demanding up to one-third of their revenue and block them from doing business the way they want. They make an ad (inadvertently or not) celebrating the destruction of every creative tool that isn’t sold by Apple. They antagonize regulators by exerting their power in ways that impact the entire market. They use a supposedly neutral notarization process to block apps from shipping on alternate app stores in the EU. Most recently they demand 30% of creators’ revenue on Patreon. No single action makes them the bad guy, but put together, they certainly aren’t acting like a company that is trying to make their enthusiast fans happy. In fact, it seems Apple is testing them to see how much they can get away with.”

7. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you etc

Who amongst us could possibly have predicted that the emissions claims of giant technology companies would turn out to be complete hogwash based on dubious accounting techniques. And that, in fact, their emissions have been steadily climbing even before the current vogue for carbon-hungry AI? (Via the super-smart Rachel Coldicutt.)

8. The best iOS is the one you can’t get, Americans

As Federico says, the fork of iOS that’s available in the EU is the best version of iOS.

9. Just in case you have forgotten how bad Microsoft was

Remember when Microsoft deliberately broke Windows if it was running on a competitor’s version of DOS? This is why you don’t let platforms have as much control as the likes of Google and Apple have today. It’s not that they’re bad people: it’s that all the economic imperatives are towards things which harm competition and so, over time, harm customers.

10. No

Could geo-engineering help save the planet?

Ten Blue Links, "Gnarls Barkley is innocent" edition

1. Just because we killed you doesn't make us liable

Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan died after eating a meal at a Disney resort. Her family claims this is down to an allergic reaction after the restaurant allegedly failed to label their food properly. So far, so tragic — but tragic in a completely normal way. What makes this incomprehensible, though, is that Disney's legal team have decided that a clause in the Disney+ streaming service's ToS — which one of the plaintiffs had trialled a few years ago — means the case can't be tried in a court. While this sounds extreme, terms of service are chock-full of this kind of stuff, all designed to create a parallel legal system that's easier for large companies to game to their advantage. Not content with having a legal system that's inherently rigged in their favour thanks to costs and their ability to lobby to have laws they don't like watered down, companies are trying to avoid any legal responsibility. Truly, we live in feudal times.

2. But wait, what's this coming over the horizon?

Finally — finally — though, big companies are getting held to some semblance of account. Last week Google found that just because you're acknowledged as the best product doesn't mean you can also pay potential competitors to ensure they don't challenge you. Cory Doctorow's talk at Defcon 32 outlines what's going on, and why regulation and law is the biggest sharpest tool in the box to ensure a competitive landscape in tech and elsewhere. Required reading.

3. You all know who Stanley Baldwin is, right?

Baldwin was the British prime minister who finally stood up to the press barons in the UK -- and won. That's a lesson today's leaders, including Keir Starmer, should take to heart. This article highlights European Commission Thierry Breton's public letter to Elon Musk as a similar moment. It is, of course, only part of Europe's ongoing campaign to make big tech companies actually follow the same laws as everyone else. You might agree or disagree with individual actions, but if you don't believe that companies should be subject to the law “without fear or favour” then you probably shouldn't keep reading this blog.

4. “Associated fees”

I genuinely try not to include yet more Apple-bashing every week, but — oh Tim! – they make it really hard for me. Take the announcement this week it would finally (I'm using that word a lot this week) open up the NFC features on iPhones to third parties globally, allowing them to create payment systems which don't have to go via Apple Pay. Yay! Except… “to incorporate this new solution in their iPhone apps, developers will need to enter into a commercial agreement with Apple, request the NFC and SE entitlement, and pay the associated fees”. What fees? Who knows — Apple isn't saying yet — but the idea that a developer can do anything at all on the iPhone without paying the company even more money seems to be one that Tim and the boys can't accept.

5. Double Cory

Another thing I try not to do is link to the same person in a week, but in addition to a great speech at Defcon, Cory Doctorow gave Apple a well-deserved kicking over everything that I seem to write about every week. And it relates back to the sad story of Dr Tangsuan, too. As Cory puts it: “Apple doesn't oppose regulation; Apple loves regulation, so long as they're the ones doing the regulating. They want to be able to shape and define the digital market, backed by the power of the state, but without any input from the state. In modern corporate orthodoxy, the state is an enforcer for corporate will.”

6. Who controls what you see on the web?

Another of Cory's concepts that I like is the idea of a web browser as user agent. It's a piece of software designed to show you the web in the way you want: with or without ads, text-only with all the crap giant images stripped out, or whatever. I was thinking about this when I read Nick Heer's article on the way Google is taking increasing control over the way that search results are represented on its site. As I have written before, the AI answers which are now infesting results are not only hard for publisher will become the default click for most users — even if they are generally pretty bad results. Currently there are many ways to get rid of them, but I doubt those will last if Google gets its way.

7. Damn, I want one

Ars Technica has a long (of course) review of the latest Framework laptop, and it makes me want one. I'm 99% sure that my next computer will be a Framework because I adore the concept of being able to easily upgrade everything on it (and reuse parts elsewhere). One impressive thing about the new model: compared to the original, you're getting roughly double the battery life. It's still not MacBook Air level, but it's close enough for most people.

8. The early history of CP/M

Annoyingly I didn't note down where I found this (if it's your site, please let me know) but this is an amazing article by Gary Kildall, who wrote CP/M, on its early history, from a 1980 edition of Dr Dobbs.

9. The later years of Douglas Adams

Although Douglas Adams was MacUser's first inside-back cover columnist (and owner of the first Mac in the UK), and Michael Bywater was a regular columnist later on, I never realised the two were friends. Or, in fact, that Bywater was Adams' occasional ghostwriter when Douglas was finding it difficult to get motivated. Parts of this article reference events I remember, particularly the launch of Starship Titanic, but there is a lot in it that I didn't know.

10. The NSA is refusing to release a historic video of Grace Hopper

Via Bruce Schneier, the NSA has discovered in its archives a video of a talk by Grace Hopper on “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” — but, so far, is refusing to release it. The reason is that the recording is in a tape format which they can't easily watch as they no longer have a player capable of working with it. That in turn means that the NSA can't view it and redact it (as, legally, they probably have to if it's an internal document). Of course, they could borrow such a player from someone else, which the NSA seems reluctant to do. This kind of information archaeology always reminds me of Mark Pilgrim's post from (crikey) 18 years ago: “I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.”