- Timothy Burke is a journalist who had his devices seized by the FBI in an investigation into “leaked” Fox News footage. Having paid Google a lot of money over a long period for storage, he’s now been told Google is basically going to close his account and he has seven days to move hundreds of terabytes off their servers, or they will delete it. This is the danger of cloud storage: if you don’t have local copies, your files are not your own.
- Related, Cory wrote about how DRM allows companies to simply force you to accept downgrades to service. Which a bunch of PlayStation users found out the hard way when Sony simply removed content they had bought and paid for.
- Steven Levy wrote about Google’s NotebookLM, which is a service that lets you upload content and use a large language model to query it. This is a smart application of AI, but I want this to be local: I don’t want to have to upload my content into someone else’s servers.
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, AI is bad now edition
First up, apologies that there's been no long form post this week. I've had some family stuff which had to take priority over writing. Normal service should be resumed from next week.
And now on to the good stuff…
1. The last refuge of the desperate media
Ahh, low rent native ads — the kind that are designed to fool people into clicking by appearing to be genuine user or editorial posts. Always a sign that a company is desperate for revenue, any kind of revenue, and never mind the longer-term implications on quality. Now, why would Reddit want to do that?
2. Repeat after me: AI is not a thing
More specifically, AI is not a single technology, and what we talk about in the media as “AI” is, in fact, quite a limited, relatively new tool coming out of AI research — the Large Language Model, or LLM. Why does this matter? Because (how shall I put this?) less technically educated executives are likely to read articles like this one, about the successful use of AI in the oil industry, and think that they need to jump on the AI bandwagon by adopting LLMs. These are two very different things: Robowell, for example, is a machine learning system designed to automate specific tasks. It learns to do better as it goes along — something that LLMs don't do.
3. Tesla bubble go pop
The notion that Tesla was worth more than the rest of the auto industry combined was always bubble insanity, and it looks like the Tesla bubble is finally bursting. And this, of course, is why Musk is grabbing on to AI and why he proposed OpenAI merge into Tesla: AI is the current marker for a stock to end up priced based on an imaginary future rather than its current performance. Musk needs to inflate Tesla again, and just being an EV maker won’t now do that.
4. This is fine
I'm almost boring myself now whenever I post anything about the era of mass search traffic for publishers drawing to a close. But then someone comes up with a new piece of researching showing an impact of between 25-60% traffic loss because of Google's forthcoming Search Generative Experience. The fact that Google effectively does not allow publishers to opt out of SGE — you have to opt out of Googlebot completely to do so — should be an indication that Google has no intention of following the likes of OpenAI in paying to license publisher content, too. And I think the SGE is just the first part of a one-two punch to publisher guts: computers and how we access information is going to become more conversational and less focused on searching and going to web pages. As that happens, the entire industry will change, and it could happen faster than we think.
5. Feudal security
I often link to Cory Doctorow's posts, and it's not just because he's a friend -- it's because a lot of the things that he's been talking about for years are beginning to be a lot more obvious, even to stick-in-the-muds like me. This piece starts with a concept that I have struggled to articulate -- feudal security — and sprints on from there.
6. LLMs are terrible writers
Will Pooley has written a terrific piece from the perspective of an academic on why LLMs just don't write in a way which sounds human. They don't interrogate or question terms (because they have no concepts, so can't), there is no individual voice, they make no daring or original claims based on the evidence, and much more. My particular favourite — and one I have encountered a lot — is that LLMs love heavy sectionisation and simple adore bullet points. I've got LLMs to write stuff before, specifically telling them not to use bullet points, and they have used them anyway. As Tim succinctly put it in a post on Bluesky, LLMs create content which is “uniformly terrible, and terribly uniform”.
7. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto
Craig Wright spent a lot of time claiming he was the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and suing people on that basis. Finally, a court has ruled that he was lying. Whoever Nakamoto is/was, he's probably on an island somewhere drinking a piña colada.
8. Google updates, manually hits AI-generated sites
You might have noticed that Google did a big update in early March, finally responding to what everyone had been saying — that search had become dominated by rubbish for many search terms. Smarter people than me are still analysing the impact of that update, but one thing which stood out for me is there was a big chunk of manual actions to start. Manual actions are, as the name suggests, based on human review of a site, which means they are a kind of fallback when the algorithm isn't getting it right. And guess what the manual actions mostly targeted? AI content spam. All the sites that were whacked had some AI-generated content, and half of them were 90-100% created by AI. Of course, manual action is not a sustainable strategy to combat AI grey goo, but it should be a reminder to publishers that high levels of AI-generated content are not the promised land of cheap good content without those pesky writers. If you want to use it, do it properly.
9. The web is 35 years old, and Tim Berners-Lee is not thrilled
The web was meant to be a decentralised system. Instead, it's led to the kind of concentration of power and control that would have made the oligarchs of the past blush. That's just the starting point of Tim Berners-Lee's article marking the web's 35th anniversary, and he goes on to provide many good suggestions. I don't know if they are radical enough — but they are in the right direction.
10. A big tech diet
It's a long-standing journalistic cliché to try some kind of fad diet for a short period of time and write up the (usually hilarious) results, but in this "diet" Shubham Agarwal tried to drop products from big tech companies, and of course, it proved harder than you would think. Some things are pretty easy — swapping Gmail for Proton isn't hard (and Shubham missed out some tricks, like using forwards to redirect mail). But it's really difficult to avoid some products, like WhatsApp or LinkedIn, because there are few/no viable alternatives. That, of course, is just how the big tech companies like it because they long-ago gave up on the Steve Jobs mantra of making great products that people wanted to buy in favour of making mediocre products that people have no alternative to using.
The end of the line for Google
“Personally, I don’t want the perception in a few years to be, ‘Those old school web ranking types just got steamrolled and somehow never saw it comin’…’”
Google engineer Eric Lehman, from an internal email in 2018, titled “AI is a serious risk to our business”
I should, of course, have put a question mark at the end of the title of this, but I very much do not want to fall foul of my own law. And, of course, talking about the end of the line for Google as a company is like talking about “the end of the line for IBM” in 2000, or “the end of the line for Microsoft” in 2008. Whatever happens, Google has so much impetus behind it, so much revenue, that a quick collapse is about as likely as my beloved Derby County winning League One, Championship and Premier League in three consecutive years. It isn’t happening, much as I might dream.
This is one of the reasons I quipped that Google could see the $2.3billion that Axel Springer and other European media groups want for its alleged monopolisation of digital advertising as “just the cost of doing business.” It’s the equivalent of someone having to pay a £250 fine for speeding: annoying, but not the end of the world, and not actually that likely to keep you down to under 70mph in the future.
Google’s problems, though, do run deep. Other than, as my friend Cory Doctorow has noted, the 1.5 good products it invented itself (“a search engine and a Hotmail clone”), the most successful Google products are acquisitions. Android? Acquired. YouTube? Acquired? Adtech? Acquired. Even Chrome, which dominates web browsing in a way which many people (including me) find more than a little scary, was based on Apple’s WebKit rendering engine – which was, in turn, based on the open source KHTML.
The fact is, Google is incredibly bad at successfully bringing products to market, to such a degree that no one trusts them to do it and stick with it for long. It continually enters markets with fanfare, only to exit not long after.
Take social networking. You probably remember Google+ (2011–2019). You may even remember Orkut (2004–2014). Perhaps you know about Google Buzz (2010–2011). But do you remember Jaiku, an early Twitter competitor which Google bought – and buried? The resources of Google could have been used to accelerate Jaiku’s development and – perhaps – win the battle against Twitter and the nascent Facebook. Instead, the company took two years rebuilding Jaiku on top of Google’s App Engine, with no new features or marketing spend to support the product. Two years later, they killed it.
What Google is pretty good at is producing research. Its 2017 paper on transformers directly led to many of the large language model breakthroughs which OpenAI used to create ChatGPT. Failing to spot the potential for its research isn’t unknown in technology history, but really great companies don’t allow others to turn themselves into competitors worth $80 billion on the back of it.
And particularly not when those other companies create technology which directly threatens core businesses, in this case, Google’s “one good product” – search. The bad news for Google is that even in the middle of last year, research showed people using ChatGPT for search tasks performed just as well as using a traditional search engine, with one exception — fact checking tasks. That, of course, is a big exception, but ordinary people use search engines for a lot more than just checking facts.
What’s also notable about the same research is that ChatGPT levelled the playing field between different educational levels, giving better access to information for those who have lower educational achievement. That strikes at the heart of Google’s mission statement, which promotes its goal of “organis[ing] the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” (my italics). Search, as good as it is, has always required the user to adapt to it. Conversational interaction models, which ChatGPT follows (the clue is in the name), change that profoundly.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christiansen talks about the difficulties that successful companies have in sustaining innovation. Established businesses, he notes, are excellent at optimising their existing products and processes to serve current customers (this is called “sustaining innovation”). However, they often struggle when faced with a “disruptive innovation” – a new technology or business model that creates a whole new market and customer segment.
One of the potential solutions to this which Christiansen looks at is structural: Creating smaller, independent units or spin-offs tasked with exploring the disruptive technology can allow them to operate outside the constraints of the main company. This, of course, is probably what Google intended to do when it changed its structure to create Alphabet, a group of companies of which Google itself is just one part.
The biggest problem with this putative solution is that if you do it well, innovation doesn’t necessarily flow to where it is most needed. Google’s search products needed to seize on the research made in 2017 and integrate it. It didn’t, and – worse still – no one saw this as a potential disruption of the core business. The blinkers were too firmly on.
Perhaps that’s changing. Notably, last year that Google moved all its AI efforts into a single group, Google DeepMind. The “Google” in its name is significant: previously DeepMind was a separate business within Alphabet (and, in true Google style, it was acquired rather than built in-house). Now, on the surface, it looks likely to focus more on continuing Google’s mission, which means disrupting the traditional ten blue links.
Can it succeed? I’m not optimistic (publishers, take note). What we have here is a company which is good at research, but not at exploiting it; whose history is of one good product and a good Hotmail clone; that has a terrible record of announcing, releasing, and killing products, often multiple efforts in different categories all of which fail; and which has failed to keep its core product – search – up to date.
Perhaps the real question isn’t whether Google has reached the end of the line, but how exactly it made it this far?
Weeknote, Sunday 10th December 2023
On Tuesday, I attended (virtually, of course) an International Association of News Media (INMA) talk given by Benedict Evans on the future of news. I like Ben’s approach, which is basically to keep reminding news people that putting all their eggs in the basked of Google and Facebook was a bad idea, and no amount of begging them for money is going to make it better.
As Cory often points out, the problem isn’t Google “stealing content” – it’s that Google and Facebook have an effective duopoly over online ads. They are stealing money rather than content. Focusing on MOAR COPYRIGHT isn’t going to fix that.
I spent far too much time this week futzing around with technology rather than doing anything productive with it. Tech is my absolute best (worst) prevarication method. Instead of just getting on and doing stuff with the tech, I spend time farting around with it, installing this, playing around with that. It gives me the illusion of doing something constructive when I’m actually doing nothing of the sort.
One thing I did was to change my contract with Ionos, which I use to host and hold the various domains I have. Back in the old days, I used to self-host WordPress, which I stopped doing when I managed to corrupt an entire database and lose about a decade’s worth of posts. I was still paying for services which I no longer needed, including legacy support for outdated versions of MySQL, so managed to cut down my costs quite considerably. I should have done that sooner.
One project which I might embark on is to trim back my online presences and consolidate into one site. I currently have my tech blog, this site, and also a Substack. Oh, and a small site on Writing.as for short fiction. I’m tempted to merge them all into one, on WordPress, which would be cheaper to run and potentially make more sense.
But I am definitely not embarking on this for a while. Too much other stuff to do.
One project which I really do have to get to grips with is consolidating all my files into a single, coherent place. Every time someone has launched a new online file storage system, I have tried it out. That used to be excusable – it was my job to know about stuff like this – but now it’s not, and it’s in desperate need of consolidation.
I have files on Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and two different OneDrives. There’s a lot of duplication, but the structure of all of them is quite different. It’s going to be a semi-manual mess to work out how to get it all in one place.
And that’s not even thinking about which place it should be. My main rule is that everything must be stored locally on at least one machine, which then gets locally backed up, and as the ThinkPad is the device with the most storage that rules out iCloud. OneDrive seems reluctant to store everything locally, even when I tell it to. That leaves Dropbox.
But that means paying for another storage service, which seems silly when I have a lot of OneDrive storage space. I have a personal Microsoft 365 account, for access to Word/Excel/PowerPoint, and that gives me 1Tb of OneDrive storage, effectively thrown in for nothing.
I have the free version of Dropbox, but because I have had it for a long time and they have done a lot of “get free storage” promos over the years, it gives me nearly 9Gb of free space. That’s enough for a decent-sized “working documents” folder, storage everything that’s in use. Everything else can be be archived easily.
So perhaps that’s a good first step: get everything on to the ThinkPad, which is easily done, sort all the files, and use Dropbox for “working documents”. Sounds like a plan.
But not for today.
Three things which caught my attention this week
This week I have been reading
Michael Jecks, thriller writer and pen expert (no really) has a new book out – the first that he’s self-published. It’s called One Last Dance Before I Die and as with all Mike’s books, it’s a well-constructed pacey read, which I would highly recommend if you want something fun and light.
I’ve also been reading Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel, which is pretty good even if he is a bit snotty about genre fiction.
This week I have been writing
Remarkably little because I have been futzing around too much with technology. I did, though, write something last Sunday about resurrecting my MacBook Pro. The only downside I have found to that machine is that, compared to everything else I use, its keyboard really does suck. I’m so glad that Apple went back to proper switches.
What I’ve been reading today: Firefox, Spotify sucks, spoken word recording and combat drones
The latest version of Firefox includes better support for ProMotion displays, for those lucky lucky people who have a new 14- or 16-in MacBook Pro.
You’ve probably heard about Amazon’s Ring handing over video doorbell footage to police without a warrant. Turns out that the terms of service for Google Nest allows them to do the same thing. Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video on the other hand is end-to-end encrypted so Apple can’t do this, even if it wanted to.
Spotify Car Thing, a product which should never have crawled out of a company brainstorming session, has been unceremoniously dumped after just five months on sale. I avoid Spotify like the plague because I don’t want a penny of my money to the odious Joe Rogan.
I asked the wonderful Mr Christopher Phin for some advice on an audio setup for recording books (not for me, I should add). Needless to say, he massively overdelivered and wrote the definitive post on what you need to record spoken word.
Remember the Bayraktar TB2 combat drone which Ukraine used to such good effect in the early stages of their war against Russia? Russia wants to buy them. It will be interesting to see if Turkey – a NATO country – sell them (or more likely, find a third party country to ship them to or manufacture them under license, which then sells them to Russia).
Boris Johnson is an evasive weasel. Nothing more needs to be said on that score.