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.

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.

Taboola targeting

Eric Seufert, on Threads:

Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective, assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s the point.

This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Taboola doesn't just target on context – ie based on the topic of the page a user is looking at.

Taboola's not hiding this – in fact it's one of their selling points. They call this feature "Marketplace Audiences" and it allows you to target by a whole range of demographic and intent-based audience factors, using both Taboola first-party and third party data.

You can see this in Taboola's Marketplace Audiences dashboard:

If you think it's basing membership of an audience of "Israelis in the US" or "Education: Graduate school" just on the context of the page, I have a bridge to sell to you.

So why has Eric got this wrong? I suspect because he has a little bit of an agenda. Take a look at the last sentence in his post:

Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace ads personalization.

I have absolutely no idea why a venture capitalist who "invests in the future of mobile" would want to promote the idea that only personlised ads, which require extensive profiling, tracking and targeting, are the only way to get "quality" advertising. Maybe someone out there can help me out with this?

(Via Daring Fireball)

I wouldn’t say that Apple using Taboola is going to make me rethink my Apple usage, but it’s definitely an indication that “we focus on user experience” now very much takes a back seat to “we would like to make more money” om.co/2024/07/1…

Microsoft 1998 = Apple 2024

Daring Fireball: European Commission Launches Investigation Against Microsoft for Integrating Teams With Office:

My read on this is that the EC’s stance is that its designated gatekeeping companies — all of which happen, by sheer coincidence I’m repeatedly told, to be from the US or Asia — should be forbidden from evolving their platforms to stay on top. That churn should be mandated by law.

Those of us old enough to remember back to the 1990s will recall Microsoft making very similar arguments about how antitrust was going to stifle innovation:

The Microsoft Corporation said today that a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department and several State Attorneys General is without merit and will hurt consumers and the American software industry, a leading contributor to the U.S. economy. Microsoft said it will vigorously defend the freedom of every American company to innovate and improve its products, a principle that lies at the heart of this case. Microsoft said today’s action by the Government will set a harmful precedent in which government intervention into a healthy, competitive and innovative industry will adversely impact consumers and a U.S. company’s ability to improve its products. The company said it appears that the lawsuit is more in the interest of a single Microsoft competitor than in the interest of American consumers.

Oddly enough, when Microsoft lost its cases' innovation didn't end. What did decline after the settlement of the DOJ and EU trials was Microsoft's browser market share -- a fact which some commentators would have you believe is a complete coincidence and nothing whatever to do with governments forcing Microsoft to stop being an abusive monopolist.

Ten Blue Links, "Did they really crush that lovely piano?" edition

1. Yes, Apple, we're also talking about you

Cal Newport reckons that it's time to dismantle the technopoly. Taking a cue from Neil Postman's (great) book, he defines this as the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Postman was writing in 1992(!) but if you think about the technopoly as it exists today, we're really talking about how every single technical development is thought of as an unalloyed good, from AI scraping the whole of human knowledge to Apple crushing creative tools into a product it sells (at a 40% margin). We'll come back to that one later.

2. And speaking of dodgy corporate behaviour

Along comes Google, which – against the orders of the DOJ – routinely destroyed internal communications. The only reasonable conclusion is it did this deliberately. A fine will be just “cost of doing business”. It's time to dismantle corporate repeat offenders.

3. Maybe Facebook might end up interoperable

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been a target of the far wing for a while, who see it as a charter for “big tech” to stifle their speech (which, of course, means not letting the right stifle the speech of its enemies). But as Cory Doctorow explains, it's also the only thing which stops big tech companies from censoring anything which might cause them to end up in court for libel. More than that, though, a case which is currently going through the courts might end up with Facebook and others being prevented from messing with tools which let you customise your feed on their services – for example, by filtering out all that “for you” crap which the algorithm wants you to get angry about.

4. This week's product I am a little obsessed with

An e-reader that's the size of a phone and runs Android? You have no idea how hard it is for me not to hit the buy button on this one.

5. Hey, so what about that Apple ad?

Like John Gruber, I didn't think too much about Apple's “crush” ad when it was shown as part of the introduction of the new iPad Pros (more on those anon). But the more I thought about it, the more I realised quite how tone deaf it was. The intention was to show all those wonderful creative tools being squished into an iPad, which could do it all. The execution was showing many lovely things being destroyed. How did that get past Apple's senior team? That's the bit which, if I were an Apple shareholder, I would worry about.

6. And so on to the product I'm not obsessed with

Yeah, new iPad Pros. Yeah, M4 processor. Yeah… same old iPadOS. For about the tenth year running, I'm left hoping this will be the year when Apple finally produces an operating system that can make the most of all that power. I suspect I'm going to be disappointed, again.

7. Tesla is doomed, redux

Honestly, if I held Tesla shares, I would be looking to sell them at the earliest opportunity I could take a profit. Unless Western governments intervene plenty of car companies will go to the wall because when it comes to quality EVs, Chinese manufacturers are miles ahead. So why am I mentioning Tesla is particular? Because it's vulnerable, and the stock is still massively overpriced because Musk has managed to convince suckers investors Tesla is a tech leader.

8. Where the world of scams is going

It's going to get really bad. Five years from now, this kind of fake person attack will be both commonplace and convincing, and I really don't know how we combat it.

9. You can't have it both ways, Elon

X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbours yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.” This is another example of how the safe harbour provisions of US law for internet companies are a double-edge word. On one hand, they protect them from libel based on what their users say. On the other hand, they can't then claim all the intellectual property rights over that content as if they were publishers. X Corp isn't the only company to want a smorgasbord of rights, though: Meta had previously made the same kind of claim, and lost.

10. “Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists

Headline of the week, easily. Moreover, Jack Dorsey man, WTF happened?

That time in the 90s I persuaded a Japanese film crew that my friend was Richard Branson, inadvertently foreshadowing the “geek pie” incident in “Nathan Barley”.

I’m sure that Nick Bostrom’s move from AI doomer to “maybe AI is going to save us” has absolutely nothing to do with AI making a lot of money for people who he wants to fund him.

www.wired.com/story/nic…

This sounds bad, but kudos to Dropbox for being transparent about it – and from what they say it sounds like other services (i.e. storage) were not affected.

www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu…

One of these days I am going to have to write up how I’ve turned Obsidian into the best environment for writing I’ve ever used. Today is not going to be that day though.

Informed Consent and Privacy – Pixel Envy

Informed Consent and Privacy – Pixel Envy:

Meta is probably one of the more agreeable players in this racket, too. It hoards data; it does not share much of it. And it has a brand to protect. Data brokers are far worse because nobody knows who they are or what they collect, share, and merge.

This is a point that I have made in the past: while the big companies like Meta get a lot of attention (and rightly so) data brokers further down the advertising food chain do a lot, lot worse things. That’s not to say “do nothing about Meta”, but it’s an important point to note.