Technology
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Why am I picking on Apple here? First because it’s the world’s biggest company. Second, because unlike, say, Amazon, it makes a great deal of noise about its commitments to societal good, such as privacy and recycling. No one should be surprised if, say, a car company advertised on Twitter. We hold Apple to a higher standard, because at least publicly it holds itself to one. ↩︎
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I’m assuming you don’t need me to tell you how to get around paywalls. ↩︎
It's long past time for Apple to stop advertising on Twitter
Over the past 24 hours, the hashtag “BanTheADL” has been trending on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The trending hashtag refers to the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish anti-extremism civil rights organization.
Even more concerning is that X owner Elon Musk has signaled support for the attacks against the ADL on the platform.
Within the same time frame, numerous X users have also reported being served an X-approved advertisement on the platform that promotes white supremacy.
At this point advertising on Twitter is directly extending financial support to neo-Nazis. It’s long past time that companies like Apple,1 which resumed advertising on the platform in December 2022, just stopped.
But it won’t, which is finally putting the lie to the idea that the company’s leadership team care one iota about about the impact its actions make on the culture of the country which nurtured it. “You support rampant anti-semitism on your service? No problem! Here’s some money. You explicitly allow transphobic hate speech on the service? That’s fine with us! Here, have some more money.”
Apple is very good at taking a stand when it’s easy. It refused to carry various small right-wing social platforms on its App Store, because the content moderation policies weren’t up to scratch. Meanwhile, Twitter gets a pass despite having no practical control over hate speech and an owner who actively encourages it.
Should we be considering boycotting Apple and other companies that advertise on Twitter? Let’s frame that another way: if you found out that a company was actively funding hate speech, would you want to buy products from them?
I know I wouldn’t.
On the read later experience in Pocket and Readwise
Om Malik on how the experience in Pocket has declined and his thoughts on Readwise Reader:
To me, Pocket has always been a repository where I save, store, and archive articles I want to read or use for my ongoing research. That’s its value for me. I don’t care much for their “Home Screen” and its recommendations. While it may seem minor, these changes detract from the app’s core purpose, revealing a user-hostile behavior. The changes implemented by Mozilla and Pocket prioritize their interests and haven’t notably improved my user experience.
Readwise initially offered a service for saving highlights from various sources — Apple Books, Pocket, Amazon Kindle, Twitter, and even Discord. I appreciated their approach. Then they launched Reader, their own “read-it-later” app. It lets me save articles, highlight text, add notes, enable public links, save YouTube videos (with text captions), and offers other features. Both Readwise and its competitor, Matter, prioritize enhancing the online reading experience. Meanwhile, Pocket seems to be deciding for me what I need.
I switched from Pocket to Readwise Reader when it was in early beta and I couldn’t agree more with Om’s assessment. Reader feels like it is built from the ground up to just give me a better experience for getting articles into my inbox, working with them, and getting useful information out of them into other tools. Pocket feels more like it wants to keep me within Pocket.
Apple explains why it abandoned iPhone CSAM detection
Apple explains why it abandoned iPhone CSAM detection:
“Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit,” Neuenschwander continued. “It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”
“We decided to not proceed with the proposal for a hybrid client-server approach to CSAM detection for iCloud Photos from a few years ago,” he finished. “We concluded it was not practically possible to implement without ultimately imperiling the security and privacy of our users.”
One of the things which is interesting about this is that these are the exact arguments which campaigners against Apple’s scanning proposal used at the time – and the company seems to have listened.
And that Apple has made its reasoning public gives a strong imperative to it not to try the same thing again, which is a good sign for the future.
Ha ha ha ha nope
X, Formerly Twitter, Plans to Collect User Biometric Data, Job, Education - Bloomberg:
“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the company said in its new policy. X doesn’t define what it considers biometric, though other companies have used the term to describe data gleaned from a person’s face, eyes and fingerprints.
Of the many, many companies on this planet that I would not trust with biometric data, “X” comes pretty much top of the pile.
The Real Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover
The Real Story of Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover - WSJ:
The way that Musk blustered into buying Twitter and renaming it X was a harbinger of the way he now runs it: impulsively and irreverently. It is an addictive playground for him. It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers; they don’t get pushed down the steps and beaten, like Musk was as a kid. Owning it would allow him to become king of the school yard.
The whole of this annoyingly paywalled article1 is full of absolute zingers which demonstrate quite how unsuited Musk is to owning something like Twitter.
By then, a new ingredient had been added to this cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of what he called the “woke mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. “Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told me gravely.
This use of “multiplanetary” isn’t a mistake or a metaphor. Musk has bought into the idea that we can wreck this planet and move on to the next, one that’s common amongst the Silicon Valley idiocracy.
And always remember, the personal is political:
Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition. “Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. “Don’t tell my dad.” When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” he says… He blamed it partly on the ideology he felt that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices.
It’s been rumoured for a long time that having a trans child had been an influence on Musk’s blatantly transphobic behaviour. This confirms it.
I am very glad that I no longer have a presence on Twitter.
Unraveling the Digital Markets Act
I absolutely loved this post on Unraveling the Digital Markets Act: by the team from iA, who also make one of my favourite pieces of software.
Printer makers are evil, part 3422
Judge denies HP's request to dismiss printer lockdown suiit • The Register:
HP all-in-one printer owners, upset that their devices wouldn't scan or fax when low on ink, were handed a partial win in a northern California court this week after a judge denied HP's motion to dismiss their suit.
This whole story is just a brilliant example of why there is a special circle of hell reserved for printer manufacturers. And of course it’s also exactly the kind of thing that Cory has been railing against for years. Software locks to prevent you doing things with a device you bought outright are evil.
On Cnet deleting its archive
CNet Deletes Thousands of Old Articles in an Attempt to Game Google Search – Pixel Envy:
Google says this whole strategy is bullshit. A bunch of SEO types Germain interviewed swear by it, but they believe in a lot of really bizarre stuff. It sounds like nonsense to me. After all, Google also prioritizes authority, and a well-known website which has chronicled the history of an industry for decades is pretty damn impressive. Why would “a 1996 article about available AOL service tiers” — per the internal memo — cause a negative effect on the site’s rankings, anyhow? I cannot think of a good reason why a news site purging its archives makes any sense whatsoever.There’s been quite a kerfuffle about this. This is an area where I have more than a little experience, and although it sounds counter-intuitive it is completely true that there are instances where it's better for users and the site for old content to be removed.
Although, as Nick points out, Google advises that simply deleting content does nothing for you there are three circumstances where deleting content very definitely does improve your SEO. But you don’t just delete it. Deleting content without redirecting it or in an unstructured manner just leaves you with a bunch of 404s, which you don’t want. It will also almost certainly break some of the crawl paths which Google and other robots use to find their ways around the site.
But there are circumstances where you want to delete and redirect content, either because it’s a bunch of content which is actively harming your site’s authority with Google or because it no longer best serves the needs of your audience.
The first is where that content is thin. Thin content is typical old-style news in brief pieces which are very short. Google has always disliked short content (the rule of thumb is under 300 words) and while a few pieces are fine if a sizeable percentage of your content is thin it can hurt you. Those kind of stories tend to date from the early/mid 00’s, when blasting out tonnes of content was the fashion, and a lot of new-in-brief pieces got written.
The second is when you have lots of repetitive or duplicate content – content which essentially says the same thing, over and over and over again. Big news sites do this a lot, because often with news you have covered the same story with more or less the same facts for a long time. But you will often also have content which is essentially the same, because people have the same idea for an article and don’t bother to check if it already exists – leading to two very similar articles.
Why does that matter? Because Google likes it when there’s one article on your site which provides a clear answer to a specific search query. If you have written two articles on, say, the history of the Mac Plus then it doesn’t know which one to rank and so basically down-ranks both.
The third circumstance is where you have old content receiving no traffic but which is about a keyword you are targeting. Every page has authority on some topics, even if it doesn’t rank well or at all. Often, old content isn’t maintained well. Google likes content which is updated with fresh information, because that content tends to best-serve users arriving from search. If you don’t update content, it tends to gradually lose ranking over time.
Sometimes the best approach with content like this is to start fresh – particularly when you have multiple articles on the same topic. In that case, deleting the old piece and redirecting it to a new URL is the right approach. You get the minimal authority of the old page, sending a clear signal to Google that the new page is the right one for any search queries you previously ranked for.
The Cnet memo on its process is actually a model for how you should do it, with clear guidance and opt-outs for content which is of historical value. Most content isn’t – remember the old adage that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper – but some stories clearly are. They also ensure that anything deleted is in the Internet Archive (which is another reason why the clear attempts of some publishers to kill it are so stupid).
As a writer, all this can be hard to take – after all you want to see all your articles available – but there are things you can do about it. First, make sure that you keep copies of your work. If you work for a site with an SEO team, talk to them about republishing it on your own personal blog (you can add a canonical to your post to show where the original version was published, and this is actually good for their SEO). And use Authory to keep an archive of everything across every site you publish on.
Gnome windowing becoming more like Apple's Stage Manager?
The Gnome foundation, which makes arguably the most popular desktop environment for Linux, is experimenting with new windowing models. While there’s development work going into better tiling, the more interesting mode is what they’re calling “Mosaic” – and to my eyes, it looks quite a bit like Apple’s Stage Manager.
Here’s how they describe how it works:
You open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app. For a web browser that might be maximized, for a weather app maybe only 700×500 pixels. As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn’t fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled.
That’s a pretty good description of how Stage Manager works too, although the details are different. By default when you open a new application in Stage Manager, it opens in its own “workspace”, with other windows sliding into the shelf on the side. Drag another window in and Stage Manager tries to move windows about so they overlap in the smallest possible way. The Gnome approach looks to be more aggressive about tiling and avoiding overlaps, and although the underlying grid which Stage Manager uses is more relaxed in iPadOS 17 it still feels more “gridded” than Mosaic.
It will be really interesting to see where Gnome goes with this – and what the reaction to it will be. Some parts of the Linux community are heavily committed to tiling and see overlapping windows as basically an error in the history of operating systems, while others are more relaxed and open to new ideas.
Apple and repair
I largely agree with Nick Heer’s take on Apple’s policies on repair – and the criticisms thereof. I don’t think Apple goes out of their way to engineer things which are harder to repair, and nor do I believe they deliberately engineer-in stuff which breaks third party repairs. They just build stuff to incredibly tight tolerances and are very specific about parts. But… that is ultimately an engineering choice, too. Apple chooses to place tight integration over giving users more ability to repair and replace parts.
To give Apple credit, this tight integration is part of what gives Apple devices longevity. Predictable parts means that Apple can optimise future operating systems to known targets, which is helpful if you want to ensure an older phone is usable with newer software. But I think still think it’s the wrong call. While it gives technical advantage, it increases e-waste and ultimately lessens the lifespan of the device.
Apple doesn’t have to create modular phones that are incredibly easy to repair, although it would be fantastic if it applied its undoubted engineering prowess to doing so. There are a lot of things it could do which aren’t as radical as that. Apple could publish its calibration processes, which would make third party repair easier. It could publish the schematics for its devices, as for example Fairphone do (but other phone makers don’t). It chooses not to do these things. Everything about Apple’s behaviour here is a choice, one that it could and should change.
(And before someone jumps in with “fiduciary duty to maximise profits blah blah” – even in the US, where shareholder primacy is fairly well established, courts have long held that shareholder value is not the same as simple profits.)
Five billion mobile phones will be thrown away this year, and the majority of them will not be recycled. Apple is in a position to do something which benefits its customers and society – and it is choosing not to. It could lead the industry. Instead, it’s contributing to making the planet a less healthy, more polluted place. History will not be kind on the likes of Apple.
(PS This is a bit of an experiment in publishing something to my Micro.blog rather than Wordpress, so bare with me if it goes a bit wrong.)
Apple and Disney are happy to fund Nazis
Far right influencers are first to get paid by Musk's Twitter:
The first beneficiaries appear to be high-profile far-right influencers who tweeted before the announcement how much they’ve earned as part of the program. Ian Miles Cheong, Benny Johnson and Ashley St. Claire all touted their earnings.
I had hoped that Apple would do the right thing and pull its ads away from Twitter, which has spiralled into the kind of hateful cesspit that Musk's little Nazi friends like Cheong and Tate have always wanted it to be. But apparently the company is perfectly happy to fund people who spout homophobia (hey, Tim!), transphobia, antisemitic and racist replacement theories, and more.
Mastodon, BlueSky, and Highlander Syndrome
I am total agreement with Jamie Zawinski here. There is no way I will trust anything that Jack Dorsey has anything to do with. He’s either incredibly naive – in which case he should be nowhere near a service which requires trust and safety to be at the front of everyone’s minds – or he knew what Musk was like and didn’t care (in which case… you guessed it).
I don’t, though, really care if people jump from Twitter to BlueSky. There is room for more than one successful microblogging platform and different people will have priorities which aren’t the same as mine. I don’t particularly want to spent a massive amount of effort on a centralised service, but you might feel differently.
There is a lot of Highlander syndrome here: “there can be only one” social network which wins, there can be only one platform which everyone must be on. Some of this comes from the narratives which tech journalists love to write about. Conflict sells, conflict drives clicks, and if you can personalise the conflict to two “heroic founder” figures duking it out, all the better.
This isn’t, by the way, some kind of failing solely in journalism. Our oldest and most fundamental narratives frame things as battles between giants. The myths of gods and heroes are full of them, and seeing founders in the same vein is just part of the same old story. We do it with kings, religious leaders, scientists, you name it. Even our efforts to celebrate the collective often devolve back into hero worship. We’re just not very good at celebrating the collective, unless we have a clear enemy to stand against.
Just why do journalists love Twitter so much?
Om Malik highlighted a survey by Muckrake which shows a bigger proportion of journalists expecting to spend more time on Twitter in the next year than less:
To anyone following the trajectory which Twitter under Musk has taken this makes no sense at all. The service suspended the accounts of journalists who criticised him. It curtailed efforts to prevent attacks on women journalists, leading to an upsurge in more attacks. It reinstated the accounts of far right activists who had been suspended because of threats to journalists. It has deliberately reduced the reach of posts mentioning Substack, a platform which many journalists use to directly reach audiences.
And of course this is in addition to providing a safe harbour for bigots, racists, homophobes, transphobes, anti-semites, anti-vax myth peddlers, climate change deniers, and mass murderers who have been charged with war crimes.
So why do journalists appear so reluctant to even reduce their time on Twitter, let alone abandon what’s obviously a dying platform which is slowly choking on the hate that Musk is encouraging?
There are a few factors at play. The first is that most journalists are incredibly conservative when it comes to new technology of any kind. Journalists were slow to understanding blogging and how it was going to change publishing. They were slow to social media: as Anil Dash points out, “prestige media won’t go to the fediverse for another 2 years, same lag where they didn’t think Twitter existed until after Ashton Kutcher legitimized it.”
The second is that almost universally journalists overestimate the amount of engagement and traffic which accrue from Twitter versus any other kind of social media. When I worked in audience development, I would often ask journalists who weren’t familiar with traffic numbers where they thought social traffic came from. Universally, they would put Twitter at the top.
In fact, referrals from Facebook dwarf Twitter, and they always have. Facebook accounts for 90% of social media traffic for publisher and news websites, 10x that of Twitter:
If what you care about is ordinary people reading your stories, you will get 10x the results from effort put into Facebook vs Twitter.
What you won’t get – and this is the important point – is 10x the attention from other journalists. Journalists love Twitter because it connects them to other journalists. It’s talking shop, and shop window for themselves and their work. Some journalists have made their careers through being noticed by other journalists on Twitter: there is an entire coterie of political journalists, for example, who have become “big beasts” because of the attention they get there, not from ordinary people, but from other journalists.
Journalism is an intensely social and sociable practice. It’s also often – particularly in newspapers - run on a “who you know” basis, which is one of the reasons that over half the top 100 journalists in the UK went to public school. Being able to parade your engagement skills on Twitter in front of your peers has helped people get jobs, and, at the very least, it can establish your name.
So no, I’m not surprised that journalists are clinging to Twitter like a life raft, despite the direct attacks from Musk, the bigotry, and the clear decline in the platform’s importance to ordinary people. It’s not about the plebs. It never was.
Going down the Twitter memory hole
Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged
I'm surprised M.G. can't remember back to the early years of Twitter, because I know he was there and suffered just as many fail whales, lost posts, and crappy errors as I did.
Also worth remembering: as Ben Thompson has pointed out, by the objective standards of modern internet corporations, Twitter failed. It's too small to be an interesting scale play and offers no advantages to advertisers over Facebook. Advertisers used it because they don't like to put all their eggs in a single basket. Journalists used it because all the journalists in the world are on it, and we're gossipy little monkeys who like to show off to all our friends.
That said, this oversized profile with media professionals meant that Twitter had an oversized influence on the media (and so political) landscape.
But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space.
I disagree. I don't think that M.G. or any of the very comfortable Silicon Valley folk who have made the uber-capitalist VC world their home really understand quite how much the ground is shifting. Their world is drawing to a close. Something new is happening, and not being beholden to massive corporations is part of it. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Musk could make his own phone. But no, he won't.
Daring Fireball: Should Be Easy, Indeed:
The hard part is that what he’s really talking about is making his own phone with his own app store. (Android phones that don’t play by Google’s rules also don’t get access to Google Play Services, which is effectively a closed-source segment of the Android operating system. Outside of China, I’m aware of zero successful Android phones that don’t use the Google Play app store by default.)
This isn’t quite correct. You can create a fork of Android which can access apps from the Play Store, without the Play Store. There are open-source versions of the Play Store APIs, and you can use Aurora Store to access apps with or without a Google account. This is one of the ways Graphene OS uses optionally to run those apps.
But it is hit-and-miss. Like every kind of development which attempts to reverse engineer something, it will occasionally break and apps can go awry. It’s good, but not perfect – and I suspect that were a major figure like Musk to go down this route, Google would have legal teams on it in seconds.
Thinking again about Stage Manager on iPad
The big reason I was eagerly awaiting Stage Manager wasn’t using it on the iPad’s screen: it was the promise of proper second-screen support. I have had a dream of using the iPad with a big monitor for a long time, and Stage Manager seemed to be the solution I have been waiting for.
Of course, we all know what happened next: Stage Manager was a buggy mess, and its external display support was the most buggy part of it. It worked, as long as you were prepared to have your applications crash every few minutes.
Sad to say, it’s not much better now. On the current developer release, external monitor support is back, but once again it’s buggy as hell. Stage Manager on the iPad’s main screen is working well enough to be usable, but forget about docking your device to a big display. Given the state of it, I suspect Apple is going to release it quite a bit later this year.
But here’s the thing: I’ve actually grown to like using Stage Manager on the iPad on its own. The “aha” moment was changing the display mode to “More space”, something that’s only possible on 12.9in iPads (and, I think, only on the M1 currently, although it’s intended to support older models too):
As the name suggests, this gives you more virtual space on screen by making the display work at its native resolution, without any scaling. Text on screen becomes smaller, but the flip side is that you have more space to work with.
And Stage Manager really likes having the extra space. Windows overlap less, making it easier to flip between open applications on stage. You can have bigger windows while also seeing more of the shelf at the side. It just feels more natural and less cramped than the default zoom.
All the criticisms of Stage Manager generally are still true (and if you want a good collection of them, it’s worth looking at Federico Viticci’s article). But “More Space” has made a big difference to me, and now I find that I have Stage Manager on almost all the time. Except, of course, if I want to plug the iPad into an external monitor. That, hopefully, will come.
The iPad's confusing lineup
John Gruber on the iPad's current lineup:
A lot of people are now complaining that the iPad lineup is “confusing”. I disagree. There are specific aspects of the iPads in the lineup that are confusing, or at least disappointing. These aspects are mostly related to peripherals — which Pencils and which keyboard covers work with which iPads — and I wrote about these issues last week. But in terms of the fundamental question facing would-be buyers — “Which iPad should I get?” — I don’t think this lineup is confusing. I’d argue, in fact, that it’s less confusing, because the lineup is more complete.
John then spends 424 words explaining the differences in the lineup, not including the table he had already used to show the difference in pricing above this paragraph.
If you have to spend that long explaining the differences between the products on offer, there is definitely a problem with the coherence of the product line. This is doubly true hen your explanation has to go into the details of which device has a P3 colour gamut, which has an sRGB, which one has a "media engine", which one supports Bluetooth 5.2 vs 5.0 and more. And that's before you start explaining which peripherals are on offer and why exactly the first version of the Apple Pencil still exists four years after the second generation one was introduced.
If you need reminding, the iPad is a device where you just shouldn't have to worry about that shit. It's a classic product where a Steve Jobs four quadrant approach works perfectly: consumer, pro; small screen/large screen. Of course, there will be variances in storage space within those quadrants, but the core of the product doesn't need to be more complex.
I have no doubt Apple knows internally this is a mess of a lineup. However, there are many reasons a company ends up with a confusing product line, usually in a transition period for the device. Sometimes this is driven by parts supply: for example, if a key part in (say) the iPad Air is constrained and will be for some time, making a similar device without that part to siphon off customers is a smart move if you have the ability to do it.
Sometimes it means an entire product remains in the lineup because you have a bunch of them that you need to sell off. And manufacturers can get blind-sided: it's easy to see how the new iPad could have been meant to be a replacement for the 9th generation version but ended up not being able to be manufactured at the same price.
Either way, the iPad line up is a mess. There might be good reasons why it is, but attempting to claim its not is a bit daft.