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.

1. Oh was there some new Apple stuff?

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

2. Private cloud compute

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

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

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

4. The new Reeder

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

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

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

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

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

5. iA Writer keeps getting better

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

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

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

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

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

6. One for the book pile

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

7. Ice. Ice. Baby

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

8. Spamming the regulator

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

9. Rage bait on Threads

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

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

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

1. Model collapse isn’t just for AI

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

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

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

2. RIP AnandTech

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

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

3. Monoculture is mono failure

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

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

4. I just wish Bluesky was actually a federated system

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

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

5. JISC leaving Twitter

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

6. The NeXT IPO that never happened

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

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

7. Moof!

If you know, you know. 

8. Starship Stormtroopers

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

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

9. The best novel about 21st Century male loneliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Your occasional reminder that macOS malware exists

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

4. Adversarial interoperability made the computer we know and love

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

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

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

6. Are we the baddies?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. No

Could geo-engineering help save the planet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. “Associated fees”

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

5. Double Cory

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

6. Who controls what you see on the web?

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

7. Damn, I want one

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

8. The early history of CP/M

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

9. The later years of Douglas Adams

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

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

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

1. IBM 1956 = Google 2024 (and Apple, and Microsoft, and and and)

As I've noted before, you are likely to read an awful lot of bad punditry about Apple's cases with the EC/DOJ in the next few months/years. But you're likely to hear a lot of even worse punditry about the judgement in Google's case. One thing to bear in mind whenever you read something is this: what is legally permissible when you're a smaller company can become illegal action when you're a monopoly. A “distribution agreement” that's OK when you're a scrappy upstart in a competitive market is likely to be exclusionary practice for a monopoly.

2. "The Purpose of antitrust is to protect competition"

Another great piece in The Verge was the long interview with Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general for antitrust at the DOJ. It's worth a read in its entirety, but probably the most important point is where Kanter talks about "the restoration and validation of a core of element of antitrust — the purpose of antitrust is to protect competition and the competitive process." This is bringing the US view of antitrust both back to its pre-1980s roots and closer to that of the EU (which is obsessed with protecting competitive markets), and it bodes badly for big tech companies.

3. Acquisition by stealth

Interestingly, one of the questions that Kanter is asked but doesn't really answer is about Microsoft's deal which saw it gain 51% of OpenAI and a chunk of control over it without actually buying the company. These "acquisitions by stealth" are increasingly common, as big tech firms see them — wrongly — as a way of avoiding antitrust trouble. The latest such deal has seen Google “buy” Character.ai by hiring its team, licensing the tech and handing investors a cheque for $2.5bn. The company still exists — in theory — but as Ed Zitron points out "without exclusive access to their models, and without an engineering team, the company is effectively dead." The problem for the likes of Google, as Kanter makes clear in his Verge interview, is that the DOJ is wise to the move. I wonder which big tech company will get hauled through court over this practice first.

4. Apple's increasingly Vista-like prompts

Since macOS Catalina, Apple has loved prodding you to check if you really wanted to do something. This is not a bad thing: Unix-based/like systems like macOS let users do many things which could endanger the security of the computer, and there are many people out there who make a living from fooling you into doing something you shouldn't. But, as Jason Snell notes, macOS Sequoia takes this a step further by making you confirm permissions over and over again — in some cases, every week. Jason says, "at some point, the user must be in charge" and this is an argument that I come back to a lot. There is a group of (very loud on the internet) people who want Apple to oversee their computers, “protecting” them from everything so they never have to learn to take any responsibility for themselves. I'm not one of those people, and I genuinely think most computer users don't fall into that camp either.

5. Weaponised litigation

Elon Musk is suing an advertising group because no one wants to put ads next to homophobic, transphobic, racist and far-right content. Nothing says “loser” like this level of entitlement.

6. Fees fees and more fees

Does Apple really think that crap like this is going to fly? As Benjamin Mayo points out, this means that, in theory, Apple could end up being entitled to fees from a service which is purchased on Android. John Gruber is correct, in saying "what Apple wants is to continue making bank from every purchase on digital goods from an iOS app". But Apple just isn't going to get that unless it starts playing the game with a little more wisdom and stops this kind of playground nonsense. Microsoft tried the same. How did that work out for them?

7. But you know Apple earns its App Store money

There is currently a deluge of fake reviews for Mac App Store products. Maybe Apple is too busy attempting to weasel out of its legal responsibilities to proactively stop them?

8. On notarisation

If you want to know a huge amount about the way that notarisation of applications works on the Mac, by the way, Howard is your man.

9. When Apple's line was a mess

Oh the Performa line. A bit before Apple was in its “beleaguered” phase, it came up with the Performa brand for its “consumer” PCs. Performas weren't actually much different to the rest of the line, but they came with some consumer software. Occasionally Mac models got three versions, all identical apart from the badge. My second Mac, for example, was the LC475, which was called that name when sold to education, but was also the Performa 475 when sold to consumers, and the Quadra 605 when sold to business. What a mess that whole era was.

10. And speaking of retro

CP/M is fifty years old.

Yeah, this one is late. I'm doing some extra work, OK? Anyway, onward.

1. Nerdy. Very nerdy

First something nerdy. Very nerdy. Of course, it’s from Howard Oakley, which is both the man who knows more about the Mac than anyone outside Cupertino and one of the world’s leading experts on cold weather survival and injury. Anyway, yes: ResEdit. If you’re old enough to remember the classic Mac, you’ll probably remember ResEdit, which let you tinker with all kinds of fun things from icons to menus. I miss ResEdit.

2. No, it’s not the fault of the EU that Microsoft hasn’t secured its kernel

Thank $DEITY$ for Paul Thurrott, who did what hundreds of other journalists couldn’t do and actually found what Microsoft was referring to when it claimed it had been forced by the European Commission to open up its kernel to third parties. This obvious bunk was swallowed and regurgitatd by the usual crowd of pundits who don’t believe big tech companies can be regulated, as well as a few who should have known better, but Paul did the work – and of course it turns out the EC did nothing of the sort. As Paul notes: “The EU didn’t force Microsoft to change Windows. It asked Microsoft to address the complaints it had raised, and this was only one of them. This change to Kernel Patch Protection was of Microsoft’s design…”

3. VCs are immoral, part 378

In particular, the odious duo of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are basically backing Donald Trump so they can pay less tax – and screw everyone who will suffer, and screw America sliding into a dictatorship. It’s great to see sites like The Verge giving them the kicking they deserve.

4. Unpersons

This is your obligatory regular missive on the general brilliance of Cory Doctorow, and this week it’s all about what happens when big tech companies pull the rug out from your lives. In this case, it’s Google, but it could equally be Microsoft, or Apple.

5. Ritual de lo Habitual

I’m a little bit astounded that Jane’s Addiction’s fantastic Ritual de lo Habitual is THIRTY FOUR YEARS OLD. This interview with Casey Niccoli, who made the artwork for the cover (and without whom JA wouldn’t have been JA) brought a lot of that era back. Also Perry Farrell is clearly an ass.

6. And speaking of asses

Elon Musk.

7. And speaking of Nazis

This is a wonderful essay-length piece reflecting on the author’s family and their ties to Nazism, about which they were not even vaguely ashamed or repentant.

8. And speaking of Nazi sea-monkeys

No really. Like lots of British kids who read American comics, I was obsessed with Sea-Monkeys, not realising of course they were just shrimp. What I didn’t know what that their inventor was a Nazi who once said “Hitler wasn’t a bad guy, he just received bad press.”

9. Surprise and delight

One of the things I have been pondering of late the sorry state of user interfaces. There seems to be remarkably little thinking going on in artistic terms. This video of Susan Kare demonstrating original Mac user interface really got me thinking about it, because the Mac user interface was packed full of delightful little elements. I wonder why we don’t often see that now?

10. Of course they are doing this. Of course they are

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that Anthropic, yet another AI start-up, are scraping data and completely ignoring robots.txt files in order to do it. Now, I am not a copyright absolutist, but one thing that a couple of decades of publishing has taught me is there’s no blanket right to suck all the data on the internet into a vast machine while offering nothing in return.

1. Oh come on, Apple

Back when Apple changed its app guidelines to permit emulators and HTML 5-based mini games it looked like the dawning of just a little bit of light in Cupertino. Completely coincidentally these changes were made just before the DOJ case at which this kind of restriction was central. And weirdly, it looks like Apple is now walking those changes back -- without, of course, putting that in writing.

When Sticky was rejected on the basis of Rule 4.7, the company appealed. Cue a call with someone from Apple:

"In our case, after the appeal, we were called up by someone from Apple who started the call saying they did not consent to it being recorded (how’s that for inspiring trust?), who walked-back what they had said about HTML5 (and of course they did not put that in writing in the message they sent afterwards), but then came up with a couple of brand-new reasons for keeping our update off the store: claiming that we had changed the app concept… because our app was different some 4 years ago and hundreds of updates ago when it started! And including mentioning rule 4.7 regarding emulators… which we are not and do not claim to be!"

2. It's all about the user experience

Unless you have an ad blocker in place you will be very familiar with the contextual advertising from Taboola. Those blocks at the bottom of web pages listing amazing hair loss treatments and cheap junk? That's Taboola. Now you can argue that those ads are junk because people click on them (and there's something to that), but junk they are.

They do, though, make publishers a lot of money -- and now Apple wants a chunk of that money, and has struck a deal with Taboola to become an advertising partner on Apple News. Om Malik has had enough. I'm not one to pull the "this would never have happened in Steve's day" card, but really, Jobs had taste: there's zero chance he would have got into bed with Taboola for a few billion dollars.

3. The objects of our life

And if you don't believe, that, I recommend watching the video that's just been found and released by the Steve Jobs Archive. It's Steve’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, and it's a great watch. For all his faults, the man had taste.

4. Eazel come, Eazel go

There was a point towards the end of the 90s when I began to believe that desktop Linux really was the future. Yes, I know. But one of the things which persuaded me was Eazel, a startup which included legendary Apple people like Andy Hertzfeld, Mick Boich and Susan Kare, who were aiming to create a user interface for Linux which did not suck. Eazel didn't last, but its product did: if you use GNOME today, you're looking at something which started life as Eazel's Nautilus file manager. I very much wish it still had Susan's icons in it. Apple rehired a bunch of Eazel employees, so if you're using macOS, you are also seeing something with Eazel DNA.

5. Return to office is a failure

Of course, it depends on what kind of work you do, but for millions of office workers around the world the one good outcome of the pandemic has been more working from home. Home working has many advantages, particularly for mid-career workers (less so for younger ones) but finally Gartner has come out and done some really interesting and in-depth research. High performing employees, in particular, hate return to office mandates because they prize flexibility and see them as a sign of distrust by managers. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you can't manage remote workers, that's your problem not theirs.

6. Google is mind-bogglingly bad

So says Om, and I have to agree: in terms of product design, Google has got a lot worse over the last few years.

7. "Privacy preserving" Lololollol

There's a bit of a brouhaha because both Firefox and Safari have added a default-on "privacy preserving ad tracking" feature, which anonymously measures ad clicks at the browser level and passes that on to advertising companies. It's not a big deal for me -- I block ads at the DNS level, so don't see them to click on them -- but it's made a lot of people unhappy.

8. Calling for civil war is, apparently "controversial"

And now for some awful people. I had never heard of this guy before he started shooting his mouth off, but apparently he's some kind of crypto big cheese, which already tells me a lot. But what made me laugh is the headline, which refers to his comments as "controversial". Apparently, calling for civil war, calling for anyone not voting for Trump to "die in a fire", alluding positively to a conspiracy theory that the guy who shot Trump was related to Elizabeth Warren… these things are all "controversial". Not "violent", "traitorous", "racist"… oh no, those words are going too far!

9. This is where it was always going

Elon Musk has decided that he owns Twitter, so he can use it for whatever he wants. An object lesson why platforms should not be owned by billionaires.

10. Return of the underdogs

One thing Apple does extremely well is advertising, and my favourite ads of the last few years have been the ones that focus on The Underdogs - I find them incredibly funny and charming, and a bit of light relief from all the travails of tech. Enjoy.

1. Couldn’t happen to a nicer billionaire

What’s interesting about the European Commission’s charges against Twitter (which I refuse to call X because it’s a stupid name) is the focus on the blue checks' policy. Everyone knew this was a bad idea driven solely by Musk’s hatred of anyone more fascinating than him. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost – at a cost of up to 6% of the company’s global revenue.

2. The end of the cheap money era

If you’re a football fan, you might know the name Clearlake Capital for its ownership of Chelsea – and the fact that it’s spent getting on for £1bn on players. All that money has to come from somewhere and like all private equity companies, Clearlake has piled a lot of debt on to its companies. The era of cheap money is over, so it’s finding it harder to follow the same model.  

3. The toxic nature of the OpenAI board seat

Not that long ago, Microsoft was proudly talking about its “observer” seat on the OpenAI board. Now it’s decided it’s “no longer necessary”. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that both the EU and US authorities have been looking at the relationship between the two companies with interest. The tech pundits will be along to tell us how this is stifling innovation or some such real soon now.

4. And speaking of private equity

Charlie Mullins, who sold Pimlico Plumbers to a private equity company, now has regrets. I’m not surprised: the private equity model is based on “efficiencies”, which can be translated as “worse services”, and Pimlico became successful because of its customer service. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the PE companies: they can always flip the business to some other sucker further down the line, after they have drained it through special dividends.  

5. Little tech (not to be confused with small tech)

Techno-optimism is so last week. Now, the odious Andreessen is promoting the idea of “little tech” which, of course, means the kind of startups that A16Z invests in. And of course, there’s no need for those companies to actually grow: the aim is to flip them to one of the big tech firms before the need to make a profit actually arrives. I’m actually glad that the thing which some smart analysts once told me didn’t happen – VC companies investing in businesses solely to flip them – is now a part of the business they’re happy to admit is the goal.

6. AI slop

Christina Warren noticed something odd: her byline was appearing against articles which she hadn’t written. It turns out that TUAW, which she used to write for a good decade and a bit ago, had been acquired by the kind of company which churns out AI-generated crap content, and they had been using the bylines of people who used to work there. Related: I have no idea who owns some of the domains I used to work on, including macuser.co.uk, which doesn’t appear to have moved to Future alongside the old print product.

7. Piracy is back, baby

Wendy Grossman – who has been writing a weekly column on the internet for longer than some of you have been alive – has written an excellent piece on the second coming of internet piracy. As Wendy notes, the emergence of piracy as a more mainstream activity comes at the same moment that streaming services have started to get pricier and worse. The removal of decades of Comedy Central clips is teaching a new generation that you can’t trust content will remain online. There is a reason I have a couple of 4Tb drives attached to a local machine, kids.

8. RIP Bruce

I missed that Bruce Bastien had died. Before Microsoft used tying, bundling and other illegal behaviour to destroy all its competitors in the 1990s, I used WordPerfect rather than Word, and it still offers features which you can’t get anywhere else. Technically, it still exists, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Related: I’m amazed to find you can still buy Quattro Pro too.

9. Switching

You can now easily transfer your images from iCloud to Google Photos. Why would you want to do that? Because if you have many images stored only in Apple’s cloud, downloading them all and then exporting using the Photos app is a horrible experience. Unless you like watching Photos’ memory usage balloon to more than 64Gb and then take down your whole system, of course. Google Photos, on the other hand, lets you download them all from the browser thanks to Google Takeout.

10. No politics allowed

When big tech platforms talk about not allowing political speech, what they almost always mean is “no political speech we don’t like”. And when Meta says it about Threads, what it means is “no marginalised people here, please.” Kudos to MacStories for publishing this.

1. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you

Surprise! The use of energy-intensive AI to make stupid graphics that look instantly like AI and write words that it would take you five minutes to right have pushed Microsoft's greenhouse gas emissions up by 30% since 2020 and Google's up 48% since 2019. But it's OK, Google's energy usage is only 0.1% of the entire planet's, it's not like it's much… there's more on this in Paris Marx's article, which is a good read too.

2. Destructive investment

Related to this of course is the entire system of investment, which focuses — at least in the US — on the primacy of shareholder interests over those of the country. This system has led directly to a lot of terrible outcomes, from Apple's “growth at all costs” approach to abusing its power in the market through to, well, Elon Musk. The same dynamic is gradually seeing many of our most valuable institutions fall into the hands of private equity companies, a group for whom the phrase “vulture capitalism” was virtually invented. And much of this delusional behaviour is, unfortunately, driven by myths about early tech companies, from the startup-in-garage to the founders-as-heroes. I have to confess that I, too, once believed in these myths. I no longer do.

3. When Apple says protecting users, it means protecting profits

A single app store and an operating system which doesn't let you install the apps you choose is a single point for any government to control your experience. That's one of the reasons why battles to prevent Apple and others having a monopoly on software installation is important. Apple's desire to “own” software distribution is not about protecting users: it's about protecting profits. Case in point: the company has bowed to pressure from the Russian government and removed a number of VPNs, which allow Russians to bypass state censorship, from the App Store. If Apple allowed sideloading, which it easily could, this would not be a big deal. But it would rather adopt the “principle” that users aren't allowed to install software from anywhere they want rather than oppose state surveillance.

4.Apple “crippled watchOS to lock out competitors”

When Apple changed its heart monitoring APIs in watchOS 5, it's claimed, it did so to ensure third-party competitors didn't get access to the same data its own apps had. I don't know if this is true, but even if it's not, it's another example of why platform owners like Apple need to be made to ensure a level playing field if innovation is to thrive.

5.Apple (Computer) Says no

Want to run DOS on your iPhone or iPad? Apple says you can't. Why not? Because Apple says so. Just because you paid Apple £1000 for your iPhone doesn't mean you get to install things you want. It's not like you own it or anything. What makes this even worse is that notarisation should be a system which is used solely to stop malware. In practice, Apple is simply using it to enforce its app store rules outside the app store — which discredits the whole purpose of notarisation.

6.Nerd History heaven

How well I remember the process of juggling INITs and CDEVs. As always, Howard has the details.

7. Meanwhile, In Microsoft land

Now if you're thinking about maybe ditching your Apple products and exchanging them for one of those fancy new Copilot + PCs, you might want to reconsider. Microsoft is going through one of its periodic seasons of hand-wringing about security, while, of course, adding in insecure features by design. Everything that Microsoft is currently doing to Windows is aiming towards a single goal: to make sure you can't use Windows without connecting to a Microsoft account, and ensuring it has access to your data. Case in point: the New Outlook, which the company has been prodding users towards for a while. Unlike the old bundled Mail app, which used IMAP or POP, new Outlook only talks to Microsoft's servers: to use it with a non-Microsoft account you have to give Microsoft access to all your third-party email. Oh, and don't think you can use it without also having Edge installed. Not doubt, if questioned, it would claim this is all for “security” or “the benefit of users”. A plague on all their houses.

8.Proton Changes

Proton, everyone's favourite bunch of Swiss-based nerds, is going to move towards a non-profit structure. This is a good thing. Owned by a Swiss non-profit foundation, the company can't be as easily taken over — and the foundation itself is legally obligated to act in a way which supports its original mission.

9. Docs, docs and more docs

And speaking of Proton, they launched their own collaborative cloud-based document system. It seems like a pretty private system: everything is encrypted end-to-end, and no data is collected that isn't necessary to make the thing work.

10.Sixteen Kids and a hitman

Away from the world of technology for the last couple of pieces. This story of an evangelical man who went on to the dark net to hire a hitman to have the biological parents of his adopted children murdered is quite the thing.

1. Oh Perplexity, why must you test me so?

I have been a big proponent of Perplexity for a while, mostly because I found it incredibly useful as a research tool. Turns out the reason it was useful as a research tool was it was scraping a load of data that it shouldn’t, pretending to be academic researchers to get access to Twitter, and more. Suffice to say, I no longer recommend it. But more than that: organisations which engage in this kind of perfidious conduct should be actively shunned.

2. The cows are lying down

And speaking of AI, 404 Media decided to conduct an experiment: how much would it cost to basically clone their site using LLMs and off-the shelf tools? The answer: $365.63. And they wouldn’t have to employ any of those pesky journalists to do it.

3. Better by you…

What was the internet like 20 years ago? Without coming across like an old git, the answer is just “better”. Like Richard, I started blogging using Radio Userland, a long-forgotten application developed by Dave Winer. Like everything Winer makes, it was really an outliner (when I first worked at Apple in 1989, we used MORE for presentations – it was also a Winer product, and also really an outliner). It was also local: it generated all the HTML for your blog on your Mac and then uploaded the changed files. I still there there’s something in that approach.

4. Are you though? Are you really?

Ever wondered what it’s like being a low-ranking professional tennis player? No, I hadn’t either — but this great piece in The Guardian had me laughing, then shaking my head, then laughing again. My favourite line: ““I am going to fight my natural hand-to-eye coordination, no matter how bad it is, I am going to hit all of these motherfucking balls until I develop a shot. I am going to do this for months and months and months: I am not going to let these rich fucks beat me.”

5. Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law

Confession time: whenever I buy an ebook which is encumbered with DRM, I crack it and save a local copy. I don’t give it away, loan it, upload it anywhere — but I don’t trust companies to keep their unspoken promise that I will always be able to access that book. Why don’t I trust them to? Here’s why. And yes, I did have books which used this DRM system.

6. And speaking of Microsoft DRM systems

Oops. Repeat after me: DRM is pointless.

7. Creative destruction

Look, in the great long list of terrible things that the Tories have spent fourteen years doing to Britain, the effective destruction of much of the support for the arts that had been built up for decades may not seem like the worst. But in terms of the breadth of people it affects, it’s probably the broadest. Obviously, underfunding organisations and forcing them to spend more time chasing money than supporting creative work is bad. But they have also hammered funding for adult education cources which aren’t “vocational”, which means that drawing, painting and other creative practice classes are not being cut – something disproportionately affects older people. Capitalism hates creativity.

8. PRs: please don’t do this

I don’t get that many unsolicited press releases these days (don’t think of this as a request) and I doubt that even during the Journalism Peak of my career I got as many as Jay Rayner, but I completely sympathise with his public letter asking that PRs do at least the minimum amount of research before sending him stuff.

9. The grumpiest man from Wales is back

God I love John Cale. Way back in the first years of this century I was lucky enough to see him do readings from his book What’s Welsh for Zen? at Komedia in Brighton, and he almost bit the head off an audience member who was trying to video him. In the twenty four years since he’s just got grumpier and he remains a vital creative force. I adore him.

10. The best reason not to use AI

We really do not need another global power crisis while we’re trying to stop the planet burning.