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.
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I’m assuming you don’t need me to tell you how to get around paywalls. ↩︎
Microsoft seems really determined to give more people more reasons to avoid Windows like the plague.
BTW, if you notice that I’m posting a bunch of little links, it’s because I’m going through the backlog of stuff I’ve saved into Raindrop.io which I TOTALLY recommend over Pinboard.
A rare Betteridge’s Law-breaking headline. Yes. Yes he was.
(Because of the nature of the content, Snopes has a pass)
This is great: a bunch of primary sources about the early Macintosh. Much reading!
I see Captain Dickhead is at it again
Weeknote, Sunday 27th August 2023
Being on my own is weird. Many of the things that I tend to do when Kim is at home turn out to be less attractive when I’m on my own for a longer period. For example, TV: I’ve watched almost nothing this week, which is unusual for someone who grew up nursemaided by the television.
(This is true. My mother used to say that before I could sit up on my own, she would prop me up with cushions so I could watch television, as it kept me quiet.)
I had a trip into London on Tuesday to see my old colleague Maria, who now works about five minutes walk from where I used to work – we had been that close to each other for months and not realised. It was great to catch up and – as it typical for when we meet up - what was meant to be a quick coffee ended up as nearly two hours of hilarity.
Despite my enthusiasm for Readwise Reader I have been tempted this week to dump it in favour of something more simple. However, I have a feeling that’s because I have a huge backlog of unprocessed reading in it and when I have that backlog in any system my instinct is to dump it and use another tool, starting from scratch. It’s a bad habit, so I’m making myself spend time going through and triaging what I still want to read.
And a reminder today that caffeine addiction is a fearsome thing. Since I stopped working my coffee intake has done up. Although I don’t drink any after 5pm it’s rare that I have less than six cups through the day, which is a lot. Enough, in fact, to make the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal bad. If you have never had a caffeine withdrawal it’s a reminder that it’s a physically addictive drug: for me, it manifests as a headache which nothing will shift, plus nausea. There’s nothing you can do except ride it out by lying down in a darkened room. Not nice
So of course I went out and got coffee. It still took a couple of hours to shift. By god I love coffee.
The three things which caught my attention
- Notes on being a single person Mastodon server is a good introduction to the pros and cons of running your own instance. It’s one of those things which falls into the category of “because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
- Another thing in the same category: how Michael Moorcock wrote a novel in three days. No really, don’t do this, unless you are Michael Moorcock.
- This unpublished (till now) piece by Harry McCracken reminded me of how much work goes into journalism before you put any words on the screen. 90% of journalism happens away from your desk – or it used to. I used to say “journalism happens when you pick up the phone” and while the method of communication might have changed, the fundamental principle hasn’t.
Things I have been writing
I wrote an ending to a story and then junked it. So much for that.
Things I have been reading
The Agony and the Ego, edited by Clare Boylan, is out of print but I was lucky enough to find a copy in the University of Kent Library. It includes a wonderful essay by Hilary Mantel on her writing method, which appears pretty close to mine: it involves the steady accretion of phrases, characters and situations until something takes shape, rather than a pre-planned, heavily plotted form. Annoyingly this appears to be the only time this essay has been published – and Boylan’s book is now out of print. Copies go for about £20 secondhand.
It is always worth remembering that Steve Jobs could be a nasty piece of work when he wanted to be.
Weeknote, Sunday 20th August 2023
This has been a week of joining. First, I joined the Society of Authors. Although I’m not a published fiction writer, the body of work I have from a 28 year career as a magazine journalist counts – which means that I’m in some illustrious company.
Second, I now have a borrowers membership for the University of Kent Library, which means not only can I go along and enjoy the WiFi (you can do that for free if you want) but also borrow books – and the kind of academic books I sometimes want to read can be ferociously expensive.
This week has veered between too hot and too much rain, which is probably a harbinger of the way that British summers will be in the future. Despite my Indian DNA, I'm a northerner at heart: anything above about 23 degrees and I start to basically want to curl up and fall asleep for the hot bit. The siesta is a natural response to weather that gets too hot in the afternoon, and I expect the British to eventually embrace it.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Tim Bray has a really good review of the current state of Mastodon. It's mostly positive, and I agree with Tim that some of the things that people want (post migration) really aren't all that important. And speaking of Mastodon, StreetPass is a REALLY useful extension for finding people there.
- Elon Musk's quest to destroy Twitter continues. For me, Twitter got to the point where ethically I could no longer be part of a service which was rolling out the welcome mat to the extreme right, misogynists, abusers, racists, homophobes, transphobes, grifters and general scum bags. It’s one thing to be part of a service where they are present, but another to have an owner who actively goes out of his way to orient the service towards those users’ needs.At that point, it’s a moral question, and no amount of “value” or “usefulness” I get from that service makes a difference. So if you see me on Twitter... it's not me.
- Steve Albini used to be one of the most talented musicians and producers around, but with that came a level of assholery that was Olympic standard. He's rowed a lot of that back, and now sounds infinitely more grounded and – dare I say it – happy.
Things I have been writing
I wrote a little piece of micro-fiction which I published on Mastodon. I'm interested in doing more of this. Micro-fiction appeals to my sense of minimalism.
I also worked on a couple of exercises which might turn into stories, one about a man who is killed by a wasp and another about a man in an immense galaxy filled with humanity who goes off in search of his double.
Things I have been reading
I picked up War Bodies by Neal Asher again. Everyone needs a bit of science fiction horror in their lives, right?
Sad to hear about the death of John Warnock, who was a truly great computer scientist. His early contributions to computer graphics included breakthroughs in working out hidden surfaces, plus of course inventing PostScript which changed the world of publishing.
This weather is almost exactly the kind that makes me want to go for a long snooze, all day.
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.
This book sounds right up my street
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.
Latenote, "Sunday 12th August 2023" (but really Monday)
This week a classic "I don't have to work" project: sorting out my music library.
My music collection has been all over the place for a while. I have been using iTunes Match since it came out about ten years ago. It's a good service, allowing you to match any DRM-free audio file with the iTunes catalogue and download it to any other iTunes-equipped device, still DRM-free. I've also bought a lot of (DRM-free) music from iTunes over the years.
All of this adds up to about 35 days of music, but it's all been in Apple's cloud storage -- until now. I downloaded the lot, and it's on both a drive attached to the Mac mini (which acts as a server) and on my ThinkPad. That's about 127Gb of music, or 13,552 tracks. Crikey.
I also downloaded the music I have in Amazon's cloud. In 2013 Amazon came up with a terrific idea: if you bought a CD, you got DRM-free MP3s with it for nothing. The service was called AutoRip and amazingly it's still around – although it's not available on every album. If you have the physical space, buying music on CD is usually better than just purchasing the digital file (I think musicians tend to get paid more, and you get a physical backup).
The three things which most caught my attention
- Over in Russia, Putin has signed off on measures designed to limit access to information he doesn't like, including making it illegal to tell people how to use a VPN. Don't think this is only happening in Russia – I'm sure that our current government would love to do the same, probably in the name of "protecting children". You only have to look at the Online Safety Bill to see that.
- Jane Friedman found a bunch of AI-written books published under her name on Amazon and of course Amazon doesn't do a thing about it. Why should Amazon care? They get paid either way. The company has long gone through the enshittification window.
- Local-first software is a bit of a backlash against the complete control which cloud services deliver to corporates and I am totally here for it.
Things I have been writing
On Cnet Deleting its Archive: There's been a controversy over Cnet doing what it calls "content pruning" for SEO purposes. I've done a lot of SEO work on publisher sites, and I think the controversy is overblown. In fact the guidance they give about when and why to do it is exemplary, as are the safeguards they take to ensure it stays available on the Internet Archive.
Things I have been reading
I had a quick canter through M John Harrison's The Centauri Device which is a book I must have read a dozen times, but which I always love. It warped my head a bit when I was 10 and first read it (it was the only SF paperback in the English newsagents when I went on holiday to Spain) and, once you read it, explains a lot about me.
The Centauri Device
Finished reading: The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison 📚
I first read this when I was about ten years old and I’ve loved Harrison’s work ever since. It showed me that SF could be something different, that spaceships didn’t have to mean macho hero figures. MJH doesn’t like it, but I do.
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.
Downloading all of the music I have bought from iTunes and I am left with some deeply disturbing questions. Such as “when did I buy ‘the best of the Wurzels’”?