By John Gruber

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‘Finally’ Indeed ★

I hope you’re well-stocked with popcorn, because you’re going to need a lot of it. Dominion Voting Systems, opening its reply brief in support of its motion for a summary judgment against Fox “News” (PDF):

Finally. Fox has conceded what it knew all along. The charges Fox broadcast against Dominion are false. Fox does not spend a word of its brief arguing the truth of any accused statement. Fox has produced no evidence — none, zero — supporting those lies. This concession should come as no surprise. Discovery into Fox has proven that from the top of the organization to the bottom, Fox always knew the absurdity of the Dominion “stolen election” story. Now, having failed to put in any evidence to the contrary (because no such evidence exists), Fox has conceded the falsity of the Dominion allegations it broadcast.

That concession is no small thing. Thirty percent or more of Americans still believe the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The heart of that lie remains the false conspiracy theory that Fox legitimized and mainstreamed starting on November 8 — that Dominion stole the election, using secret algorithms in its software originally designed for a Venezuelan dictator. Because of these lies, Dominion now may be “one of the most demonized brands in the United States or the world.” Dominion employees still endure threats and harassment. So it matters that Fox in private ridiculed — and never believed — the lie. And it matters that Fox has now in this litigation conceded these allegations were false.

Later:

Fox seeks a First Amendment license to knowingly spread lies. Fox would have this Court create an absolute legal immunity for knowingly spreading false allegations — lies — for profit, regardless of how absurd the lies are, regardless how many people in the chain of command know the lies are false, and regardless how many people are hurt — so long as the false claims are “newsworthy.” Fox proffers a completely made-up “rule,” contrary to decades of jurisprudence since New York Times v. Sullivan. As Judge Nichols ruled in rejecting MyPillow’s analogous argument that the First Amendment provides “blanket protection” from defamation for statements about a “‘public debate in a public forum,’” “there is no such immunity. Instead, the First Amendment safeguards our ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’ by limiting viable defamation claims to provably false statements made with actual malice.”

Wednesday, 8 March 2023

Panic Launches Playdate Catalog ★

Speaking of Playdate, Panic has news:

Arriving with the latest Playdate OS and also available at play.date/games, Catalog is our curated store for neat Playdate software.

It’s launching with new games, and some previously released favorites.

Christa Mrgan hosted a fun video with a tour of the new games (and other news — see below). My favorite so far is Shaun Inman’s Word Trip, a deviously simple fast-paced word game, and Carve Jr. and Skew both look graphically ambitious and fun.

Panic is (finally!) almost done fulfilling pre-orders, but supply chain costs and inflation have led them to raise the price of a Playdate from $179 to $199 — but the new price isn’t going into effect until next month. I adore my Playdate (and have lost untold hours in particular to Zipper, an extraordinary game by Bennett Foddy in Playdate’s Season One collection). If you’ve been on the fence about buying one, you might as well get it now, at the original price. Then blow the $20 you saved on games in the Catalog.

‘Six Colors, but Really Just One Color and It’s the Yellow iPhone 14’ ★

Apple sent a bunch of reviewers the new yellow iPhone 14 (the yPhone? No? OK, I’ll drop it…), and Jason Snell, bedecked in yellow, went all-in with a livestream video. Serendipitously, I posted some photos on Mastodon while Snell was streaming. My take: “Yellow iPhone 14 is a nice cheery fun yellow, but a very different nice cheery fun yellow than Playdate.”

As Snell points out, Apple has been releasing mid-cycle new colors for the iPhone (and iPhone cases) for the last 4 or 5 years. They do the same thing with Apple Watch bands each spring — Basic Apple Guy has a nice gallery of today’s new band lineup. There’s nothing new technically to review — just the colors. Apple’s strategy is obvious: with an annual schedule for truly new iPhones (and watches) each September, releasing new colors in March gives them a legitimate reason to keep using one of the most powerful words in marketing — new — for a product that is, by the breakneck standards of the phone industry, no longer all that new.

Bonus Case Review: Apple also sent me the new olive green silicone case for iPhone 14. Combined with the yPhone (OK, OK, I’ll stop, I swear, that’s it) it makes for a nice Oakland A’s-y vibe. I think the purple case they sent Snell probably makes for a better combo though.

‘We Are Very, Very Close to Being Able to Ignore Trump Most Nights. I Truly Can’t Wait. I Hate Him Passionately.’ ★

Aaron Blake, reporting for The Washington Post:

Tuesday brought yet more documents in Dominion Voting Systems’ high-stakes lawsuit against Fox News over Fox’s handling of claims that Dominion’s voting machines helped rig the 2020 election.

The documents come after Dominion recently detailed how Fox executives and hosts privately derided the stolen-election claims even as the network chose to air them anyway — often credulously — in the name of appealing to its Trump-supporting viewers. [...]

While Fox’s hosts and executives clearly worried about alienating Donald Trump, it’s become abundantly clear that it wasn’t so much about personal affection as a cold business decision. Repeatedly in the exhibits and depositions, they are shown deriding Trump. In a Nov. 19, 2020, email, Rupert Murdoch appears to describe Trump and Rudy Giuliani as “both increasingly mad.”

He adds of Trump: “The real danger is what he might do as president. Apparently not sleeping and bouncing off walls! Don’t know about Melania, but kids no help.” In his deposition, Murdoch not only disputed Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but he also agreed when asked whether Trump was a “sore loser.”

Dominion’s lawsuit is the gift that keeps on giving. The quote in my headline for this post? That’s from a message sent by Tucker Carlson, and that’s what he really thinks of Trump.

As for Trump’s own team spirit:

In a Dec. 22 email, Lachlan Murdoch relayed [former New York Post editor in chief Col] Allan’s summary of a conversation with Trump.

“Col says POTUS was dismissive of Georgia race when he saw him on Friday,” Lachlan Murdoch said. “He basically said Republicans shouldn’t vote because it’s all rigged anyway. And if he can’t win no one should.”

Finally, I agree with Donald Trump about something.

Bertrand Serlet, Microsoft Employee ★

My “Hey, how come you don’t hear about ex-Apple folks launching startups?” musing in the previous item reminded me that I never linked to this news from January. Kyle Wiggers, reporting for TechCrunch:

In December, reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit (DPU), for around $190 million. Today, Microsoft confirmed the acquisition but not the purchase price, saying that it plans to use Fungible’s tech and team to deliver “multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements.” [...]

Fungible was launched in 2016 by Bertrand Serlet, a former Apple software engineer who sold a cloud storage startup, Upthere, to Western Digital in 2017, alongside Krishna Yarlagadda and Juniper Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu. Fungible sold DPUs that relied on two operating systems, one open source and the other proprietary, and a microprocessor architecture called MIPS to control flash storage volumes.

“The Fungible DPU was invented in 2016 to address the most significant problems in scale-out data centers: the inefficient execution of data-centric computations within server nodes,” Fungible wrote in a statement on its website. “We are proud to be part of a company that shares Fungible’s vision and will leverage the Fungible DPU and software to enhance its storage and networking offerings.”

The Fungible team will join Microsoft’s data center infrastructure engineering teams, Bablani said.

Bertrand Serlet at Microsoft — albeit quietly — is an outcome I certainly wouldn’t have imagined circa 2006, when he skewered the then-still-in-beta Windows Vista on stage at WWDC. Maybe the funniest 4 minutes of an Apple keynote ever.

Humane Raises Another $100 Million, Announces Partnerships With Microsoft and OpenAI, But Their Products Remain a Mystery ★

Aaron Tilley, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

The husband and wife co-founders were longtime Apple executives who departed in 2016. Mr. Chaudhri was the former director of design for Apple’s human interface team, which focuses on the user experiences of Apple’s devices. Ms. Bongiorno was a director for Apple’s operating system.

Patrick Gates, a former senior director of engineering at Apple, is also an early employee at Humane, where he serves as chief technology officer. The $100 million round was led by Kindred Ventures and included participation from Microsoft, among others. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, who was an early investor in Humane, also joined in the new round. The company previously raised two rounds of financing totaling $130 million.

As part of a fundraising announcement Wednesday, the company said it would be working with Microsoft to power Humane’s cloud services. Humane would also be partnering with OpenAI to integrate its AI technology into the Humane device.

Here’s Humane’s press release. Most interesting to me isn’t the additional funding — though it is worth noting they’re up to $230 million total and this is their third round and the still haven’t shipped anything — but the partnership with Microsoft. Apple, I am reliably informed, wants nothing to do with Humane. Bongiorno and Chaudhri did not leave on good terms, with Chaudhri in particular being perceived as taking excessive personal credit for work done by a larger team. I don’t know if that’s true or not, only that that’s how he’s seen, by some, in Cupertino.

I mean, it’s hard to imagine Apple investing in any startup making consumer computing devices. Apple acquires smaller companies “from time to time”, but they seemingly don’t nurture them through investments. And when Apple does acquire smaller companies, they tend to do so quietly (Beats being the exception that proves the rule). Humane doesn’t seem like a company looking for a humble quiet acquisition.

I remain keenly interested in whatever it is Humane is building. The mere fact that they’re both founded by ex-Apple executives and staffed by numerous ex-Apple employees makes them rather unique. It’s been gnawing at me lately that there have hardly been any companies at all founded by former Apple employees in the modern post-NeXT-reuinification era. There’s Tony Fadell’s Nest — but who else? I expected something new, eventually, from Scott Forstall, for example, but it’s now a full decade after his ouster, and he’s remained out of the game.

Humane is the exception. And so we wait.

Bonus Content: A 2021 investor pitch slide deck from Humane leaked a while back. I have an extremely low-res samizdat copy of a few of the slides. Might as well stop hoarding it. Who knows if the gadget described in the deck bears any resemblance to what they might eventually ship, but the deck describes something akin to a Star Trek communicator badge, with an AI-connected always-on camera saving photos and videos to the cloud, and lidar sensors for world-mapping and detecting hand gestures. (The “What is it?” slide says it’s a “Cloud connected sight enabled AI platform with server side app echo system.” That’s not really helpful to me because I don’t know what an “app echo system” is. Perhaps it was a typo and they meant ecosystem?) Humane’s patent filings describe a laser projection system for displaying a visual UI on, say, the palm of your hand, but I never put much stock into patents turning into actual products. What companies make, they patent; but what they patent usually isn’t made.

Love Letters From Letterboxd ★

How about this for Letterboxd hitting the big time: the Oscars filmed a bunch of this year’s nominees reading comments from Letterboxd reviews. It’s like the nice, kind version of Jimmy Kimmel’s “mean tweets” recurring segment. Very cool. (Via Matthew Buchanan.)

Tuesday, 7 March 2023

Elon Musk Is Watching His Back; His Security Guards Are Watching Him Poop ★

Re: Halli Thorleifsson’s quip about Elon Musk not going to the restroom by himself, the context is this report from Marianna Spring at BBC News, primarily about harassment and CSAM content moderation falling apart:

In San Francisco, the home of Twitter’s headquarters, I set out to look for answers. What better place to get them than from an engineer — responsible for the computer code that makes Twitter work. Because he’s still working there, he’s asked us to conceal his identity, so we’re calling him Sam.

“For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” he revealed. “When you look at it from the outside the façade looks fine, but I can see that nothing is working. All the plumbing is broken, all the faucets, everything.” [...]

The level of disarray, in his view, is because Mr Musk doesn’t trust Twitter employees. He describes him bringing in engineers from his other company — electric car manufacturer Tesla - and asking them to evaluate engineers’ code over just a few days before deciding who to sack. Code like that would take “months” to understand, he tells me.

He believes this lack of trust is betrayed by the level of security Mr Musk surrounds himself with.

“Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards — very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie-[style] bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom,” he tells me.

Sounds like a fun job.

Apple’s Mid-Cycle Color Refresh: Yellow iPhones 14 and 14 Plus ★

Judging by the photos, it’s a fun bold yellow. The only vibrant color other than Product Red. No mid-cycle new color for the 14 Pro models this year.

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Monday, 6 March 2023

Phony Stark Stiffed Amazon on Twitter’s AWS Bill, So Amazon Threatened to Pull Its Ads ★

Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

Elon Musk is running into an obstacle in his relentless drive to cut costs at Twitter: some of the same vendors that Twitter is squeezing to save money are also its advertising clients.

As recently as last month, Twitter sales and marketing staff were told by their colleagues that Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for advertising it runs on Twitter because the social network for months refused to pay its Amazon Web Services bills for cloud computing services, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The ad threat may have had an impact. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter paid AWS $10 million for cloud services it used, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what Twitter owes AWS based on a long-term contract the companies struck, said a person familiar with the situation. [...] Twitter’s shortfall on what it is supposed to have spent on AWS services, under a five and a half year contract signed in 2020, is now at least $70 million. And Amazon has resisted renegotiating the contract, the person said.

It’s a lot easier to bully around smaller companies, and stiff them on their bills. Not so much a bigger company. Renegotiating a contract like this is like asking to renegotiate your poker bet after you’ve lost the hand. I would imagine the negotiations have been going something like this:

Twitter: We’d like to renegotiate our AWS contract.

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

Twitter: But we’re not utilizing...

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

Twitter: OK, but can we...

Amazon: Fuck you, pay us.

iPhone Gaining in Popularity Worldwide, Especially With Younger People ★

Jiyoung Sohn, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Consumers around the world are increasingly choosing Apple Inc.’s iPhones over high-end Android smartphones, with younger users seen as pushing the company toward the level of dominance in the market globally that it has enjoyed in the U.S.

In Samsung’s backyard, where the brand’s Android smartphones have held sway, Apple’s clout has been growing since the company opened its first store in South Korea in 2018. Apple now has four stores in the country, where its mobile-payment system Apple Pay will soon become available for the first time.

Around 52% of people age 18 to 29 in South Korea were using an Apple smartphone as of 2022, up from 44% two years earlier, according to polls by Gallup Korea. Samsung’s share of this age group slipped to 44% from 45% in that time, the polls showed. For all older age groups, Samsung phones remain most prevalent.

I did not know that Apple is beating Samsung in Korea in a key demographic like 18–29 year olds.

One bright spot for Samsung is that it is leading the foldable-smartphones category it helped pioneer. Sales of foldable phones represent less than 1% of the smartphones shipped worldwide today, but their increased popularity could boost Samsung’s future position in the premium category, analysts say. Apple has yet to announce any plans for foldable phones.

How is it a “bright spot” to lead a category whose sales round down to zero?

Medium’s me.dm Mastodon Server Opens Up ★

Alex Benzer, director of product at Medium:

A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

It’s fascinating to see Medium enter the Mastodon game. For one thing, amongst Medium’s co-founders are Ev Williams (who also served as Medium’s CEO for most of its existence) and Biz Stone — two people who were at Twitter at the beginning. Williams also served as one of Twitter’s numerous CEOs.

Second, Medium is a commercial company, having raised, according to CrunchBase, $163 million (so far). To my knowledge no company with such resources has started a public Mastodon instance to date. I am very uncomfortable with the fact that nearly all Mastodon servers are free-to-use volunteer efforts, funded by voluntary donations. That’s not sustainable. I suspect a lot of Mastodon servers that seem to be thriving today won’t be around in 5 years, taking all of their posts with them. I don’t feel great about the fact that Medium is venture-backed, either, but they do charge $5/month or $50/year for a membership. I like paying for the services I use. Twitter is free to use and look how that’s gone.

Third, “me.dm” is a cool-ass domain name. If I weren’t already all-in with my @[email protected] account, I’d be tempted to start here. As every good introduction to Mastodon makes clear, it’s confusing and tricky to choose which server to sign up on. Medium’s strikes me as a good one.

Japanese Messaging Platform Line Adds ChatGPT, Gets 200,000 Users in Three Days ★

I’m linking here to a news article from PR Times, written in Japanese, but you can get the gist of it using Safari’s built-in translation feature. (What an amazing feature, by the way. Science fiction from my childhood come to life.) ChatGPT speaks and understands Japanese, but uptake in Japan has been hampered, apparently, because you need to speak English to sign up.

Line is the dominant messaging platform in Japan, and last week they added ChatGPT. You just add “AI Chat-kun” as a friend and start chatting. Up to five messages per day are free, and you can upgrade to unlimited messages for ¥680/month (about $5).

(Via Chris Vasselli.)

A Short Story About the Mac App Store ★

Cabel Sasser, on Mastodon:

A short story. We once submitted Untitled Goose Game to the Mac App Store. It was rejected by the reviewer because they thought you couldn’t skip the credits. (?!?) We explained that you could skip the credits by holding space. It was then rejected for something else and at that point we just gave up and never bothered to resubmit. Fin

Untitled Goose Game, of course, is one of the funnest and most original games of the last decade. And Panic is a company that has made a couple of decent Mac apps over the years.

The Rogue Amoeba Historic Screenshot Archive ★

Paul Kafasis, writing at the Rogue Amoeba blog, celebrating the company’s 20th anniversary:

For many years, noted Mac collector Stephen Hackett has done wonderful work with the MacOS Screenshot Library. The library offers screenshots of the Mac’s operating system dating back to the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, and we’re such fans that Rogue Amoeba has sponsored it for several years now. It‘s often helpful as a reference, but it’s also simply enjoyable to look back at the way things once were.

Amazingly, Rogue Amoeba’s own story dates back nearly as far as Mac OS X’s. We opened our virtual doors in 2002, and since then, we’ve shipped nearly 1,000 different versions across our product lineup. Given that amount of history, we thought it would be both useful and fun to document our own products.

Late last year, we asked Stephen if he’d help us spin up our own archive. He was up for the challenge, so we provided him with a pile of important releases, and he set to work documenting them with his array of old Macs. When Stephen was done, he provided us with a large collection of screenshots, sorted by product and version.

Our team then curated these images and built a way to show them off. We created galleries for each product and dug up details and stories about each individual update. It was a lot of work, but the end result feels weighty, a worthwhile repository of much of our company’s history.

This is just wonderful. A few thoughts:

• Be careful if you’ve got work on your plate today. You can lose an hour or two with this gallery, easy.
• In hindsight it’s surprising to me how quickly Mac OS X’s pinstripes faded away. In my memory, those strong pinstripes were there for an entire era, but in reality, they started fading with each major Mac OS X release after 10.0, and by 2004 were gone.
• I really miss UI design that made controls obvious. Clear affordances. All buttons obviously buttons, all text input fields obviously text input fields. Pop-up menus that are obviously pop-up menus (today’s MacOS 13 is chock full of pop-up menus that only reveal themselves as pop-ups when you hover over them). 20 years ago we bent over backwards to make the purpose of every control as obvious as possible; the style today is to make everything look like flat static text.
• Depth and texture in UI are good things. Our displays have never been better suited to displaying color and fine detail, but our UI themes today look like they were designed for output on a crummy old laser printer or something.

CPAC Speaker Michael Knowles Calls for Transgender People to Be ‘Eradicated From Public Life Entirely’ ★

Peter Wade and Patrick Reis, reporting for Rolling Stone:

The right’s war on queer and trans people took center stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference as Daily Wire host Michael Knowles on Saturday called for the eradication of “transgenderism.”

During his speech on Saturday, Knowles told the crowd, “For the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology, at every level.”

Knowles subsequently claimed that “eradicating” “transgenderism” is not a call for eradicating transgender people and demanded retractions from numerous publications, including Rolling Stone.

Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and writer, tells Rolling Stone that it’s an absurd distinction. There is no difference between a ban on “transgenderism” and an attack on transgender people, she says: “They are one and the same, and there’s no separation between them.”

The tweet linked above is from Knowles, pointing to an earlier version of the same Rolling Stone story, and reads, “This headline is libelous, and I demand a retraction.”

Keith Olbermann, in a reply to Knowles’s tweet:

You should get the fuck off the stage and apologize, asshole. This statement is your life from here on in.

Shove your hatred and bias and Nazi dreams up your ass, Motherfucker.

Olbermann took the words right out of my mouth. It’s sophistry to argue that transgenderism can be “eradicated from public life entirely” without eradicating transgender people. Eradicate is a Nazi word — one step away from exterminate — and totally means completely, absolutely, entirely. Watch the video. This is Nazism, and the only proper response to Nazis is to punch them.

Roku Doesn’t Support IPv6 and It Might Be a Big Deal ★

“DingleBog3899” on the Roku community forum (emphasis added):

Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from Roku devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale (POS) equipment. So we cut Roku some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices.

First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active Roku devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost.

Now if Roku cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency. Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached Apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free.

Seems weird to say you despise a company that supplied a Native American tribe with a slew of free Apple TVs, but the fact that he’s not an Apple fan makes it all the more telling that they went with Apple TVs as their solution. I wonder what the deal is with Roku not supporting IPv6? Is it just something they haven’t gotten to, or have they somehow engineered a tech stack that only works on IPv4?

Sunday, 5 March 2023

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Here’s an uncomfortable fact: at most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong. Kolide’s new report, The State of Sensitive Data, addresses this issue head-on.

Kolide offers a more nuanced approach than MDM solutions to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. Their premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data.

To learn more and see Kolide in action, visit kolide.com.

Josh Marshall: ‘The Deep Archeology of Fox News’ ★

Josh Marshall, writing at TPM:

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is.

In a moment like this it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it was a part of and even a relatively late entry to.

And:

One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

In a broad sense it all comes back to Stephen Colbert’s iconic line from his Colbert Report alter ego: “It is a well known fact that reality has a liberal bias.” U.S. conservatives couldn’t/can’t see that, or refuse to see it, and instead operate on the assumption that all journalism — and science — that points toward liberal conclusions is ideological. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” The foundational element of the modern U.S. conservative movement is that facts and opinions are interchangeable, that their opinions not only can trump our facts, they do, purely by the force of their convictions. Whoever shouts loudest wins, not whoever presents the best evidence.

Hence the other defining difference between Fox News and all non-rightwing TV news organizations: anger. Put partisanship and ideology aside. The anchors at other news channels are dispassionate; the anchors on Fox are angry, and they drum up anger amongst their viewers. You could see this difference best if you didn’t understand English. The anger is palpable and it never ends. Their product is outrage, not edification. They were angry under Clinton, Obama, and now Biden, yes. But they were just as angry under George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The feelings over facts worldview demands it, but it is to the detriment of us all.

Be sure to watch the video clip Marshall includes in his column, of Tucker Carlson speaking at the CPAC conference in 2009. It’s an utterly different Carlson than the one who today leads Fox News. He argued then, correctly, that conservatism needs fact-first news organizations. He almost got booed off the stage. The rest is history.

Thursday, 2 March 2023

Dow Claimed to Be Recycling Used Sneakers; Reuters Used AirTags to Prove They Weren’t ★

Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman, and Joseph Campbell, reporting for Reuters:

At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old sneakers and began digging through the pile.

There they were: a pair of blue Nike running shoes with a tracking device hidden in one of the soles.

These familiar shoes had traveled by land, then sea and crossed an international border to end up in this heap. They weren’t supposed to be here.

Five months earlier, in July 2022, Reuters had given the shoes to a recycling program spearheaded by the Singapore government and U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow Inc. In media releases and a promotional video posted online, that effort promised to harvest the rubberized soles and midsoles of donated shoes, then grind down the material for use in building new playgrounds and running tracks in Singapore.

Remarkable reporting by Reuters. After donating 11 pairs of sneakers (all of which contained hidden AirTags) at different drop-off spots in Indonesia, they flew all over Asia to track them down, and found most of them in used clothing stores. None of the 11 pairs were turned into exercise paths or playgrounds, as Dow claimed they would be. Not only is the whole greenwashing initiative by Dow an apparent scam, it’s illegal in Indonesia. And don’t miss the video — it’s really good, but, alas, ends a bit like Chinatown.

Great gumshoe reporting, in both the literal and figurative senses.

EU Antitrust Regulators Narrow Apple Antitrust Probe, Zeroing in on Anti-Steering ★

Paul Sawers, reporting for TechCrunch:

The European Commission (EC) has confirmed a previously issued preliminary view that Apple’s so-called “anti-steering” practices, which prevent developers from informing users about alternative payment options, constitutes unfair trading practices.

However, in a refined Statement of Objections sent to Apple and published for the public today, the EC also said that it’s dropping an additional anti-trust charge against the tech giant around the issue of how Apple imposes its own in-app purchase (IAP) payment technology on music-streaming service providers. It wrote:

Today’s Statement of Objections clarifies that the Commission does no longer take a position as to the legality of the IAP obligation for the purposes of this antitrust investigation but rather focuses on the contractual restrictions that Apple imposed on app developers which prevent them from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative music subscription options at lower prices outside of the app and to effectively choose those.

Sometimes the system works. I’ve thought all along that most of the EC’s probe against Apple was overreaching (the stuff about opening up IAP in particular), but Apple’s anti-steering provisions are wrong and either already are illegal or should be made illegal.

Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

In a statement shared with MacRumors, an Apple spokesperson said the company is “pleased” that the Commission has narrowed its case:

Apple will continue to work with the European Commission to understand and respond to their concerns, all the while promoting competition and choice for European consumers. We’re pleased that the Commission has narrowed its case and is no longer challenging Apple’s right to collect a commission for digital goods and require the use of the In-App Payment systems users trust. The App Store has helped Spotify become the top music streaming service across Europe and we hope the European Commission will end its pursuit of a complaint that has no merit.

Spotify no longer allows customers to subscribe through its iPhone app. A message in the Premium tab of the app informs customers that they “can’t upgrade to Premium in the app” and says “we know, it’s not ideal.” The tab does not provide any information or external links related to subscribing on Spotify’s website.

The same has been true with Netflix’s app for years. Download it and it has a very obvious button to Sign In, but if you don’t already have a Netflix account, there’s almost no indication what to do to sign up. I wrote about this back in 2019 — you can tap the small “Help” button in the corner and call Netflix on the phone and someone will tell you the answer: that you need to sign up on Netflix’s website.

Putting the legality of Apple’s anti-steering rules aside, I think they make the company look spiteful and petty. They certainly aren’t in the interest of users. Apple is only really Apple when they put the user first. Apple makes gobs of money by selling hardware and software and services that provide people with the best experiences in the world. Anything like this that’s purely about making more money at the expense of the user experience is like a malignant tumor growing on the side of the true Apple. By going after these anti-steering provisions, the EC is doing Apple a favor, despite the fact that some of Apple’s executives can’t see it. The EC might excise that tumor for Apple.

Wednesday, 1 March 2023

MAGAbert ★

Of course the best way to skewer a cartoonist is with a comic strip. Sublime work by Ruben Bolling.

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Tuesday, 28 February 2023

The Talk Show: ‘18-Hour Bombing Mission’ ★

Marco Arment returns to the show to discuss some genuinely startling revelations regarding iPhone and Apple ID security; the new HomePod 2; and our favorite electric vehicle maker. Also: coffee.

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Xiaomi Unveils Prototype Wireless AR Glasses and, Shocker, They’re Ridiculously Ugly ★

XDA’s headline claims these AR glasses “look like they’re from the future”. That must be a future where Apple no longer exists. In the future where Apple exists, Apple will release AR glasses that actually look good, not like some sort of instrument at your ophthalmologist. Then a year later Xiaomi (and their brethren companies) will release AR glasses that look as shamelessly like Apple’s as they can get away with. Then people who understand design will call them out as laughable copycats. Then people who don’t understand design will argue that there’s no other way to design AR glasses, so of course all of them look similar, including Apple’s.

Just Absolutely Shocking That an Erratic Tyrant Will Fire Sycophants Too ★

Rebecca Bellan, reporting for TechCrunch:

Twitter has laid off more than 200 employees, according to a report from The New York Times, Platformer and posts on social media from former workers.

And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Alex Heath of The Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regime.

Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss.

Kudos to Crawford for not (yet?) deleting this put-it-in-the-dictionary-next-to-the-entry-for-“brown-nose” tweet.

Things are going just great for Twitter.

‘Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming With Dave Letterman’  ★

One of my favorite bands, my very favorite host, in one of the loveliest cities I’ve ever visited. Fucking-a right.

Monday, 27 February 2023

Roger Ebert’s Review of ‘Dick Tracy’ ★

From Roger Ebert’s 1990 review:

Another of the movie’s opening shots establishes, with glorious excess, the Tracy universe. The camera begins on a window, and pulls back, and moves up until we see the skyline of the city, and then it seems to fly through the air, turning as it moves so that we sweep above an endless urban vista. Skyscrapers and bridges and tenements and elevated railways crowd each other all the way to the distant horizon, until we realize this is the grandest and most squalid city that ever was. It’s more than a place: It’s the distillation of the idea of City — of the vast, brooding, mysterious metropolis spreading in all directions forever, concealing millions of lives and secrets.

Last’s night thing had me thinking I should rewatch Dick Tracy, which I’m pretty sure I’ve only seen once, in the theater back when I was in high school. Ebert’s review seals the deal.

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Sunday, 26 February 2023

WSJ: ‘A Lab Leak in China Most Likely Origin of Covid Pandemic, Energy Department Says’ ★

Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. [...]

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has argued for a dispassionate investigation into the pandemic’s beginnings, welcomed word of the updated findings. “Kudos to those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and objectively re-examine what we know and don’t know about Covid origins,” said Dr. Relman, who has served on several federal scientific-advisory boards. “My plea is that we not accept an incomplete answer or give up because of political expediency.”

No smoking gun here, but it’s long seemed bananas to me how many people refuse to even consider the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a poorly-run Wuhan lab that researches exactly these sort of viruses.

31 New Emojis Coming in iOS 16.4 and MacOS 13.4 ★

These are all fine, but none of them seem noteworthy. It always surprises me which ones make it and which don’t. My personal short list of emojis that don’t exist but should:

• Chef’s kiss (I’d use this all the time)
• Trombone (think: wah-wah)
• Shovel
• Pickle

I forget when I wanted the shovel and pickle, but both times I was rather surprised they weren’t there.

The Courtyard ★

Cabel Sasser, writing at his wonderful and rejuvenated blog:

I think about the time it takes. I think about how you can’t see them from the street and it’s really only a treat for the people in this complex. I think about how much better they make my life. […]

Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.

Monday, 20 February 2023

Camera Phone Progress ★

Harry McCracken:

In 2005, I visited Universal Studios Orlando and took photos with my Treo smartphone. Last week, I went to Universal Studios Hollywood and took them with my iPhone 14. See if you can see tell which photo is which.

One of tech’s truisms that has no exceptions: We overestimate how much progress we can make in a year, and underestimate how much we can make in a decade.

Apple Is Lobbying Biden Administration to Overturn Apple Watch Patent Ban ★

Karl Evers-Hillstrom, reporting for The Hill:

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled in December that Apple infringed on medical device company AliveCor’s wearable electrocardiogram patents. The commission’s ruling could result in an import ban on popular Apple Watch models, unless the Biden administration steps in.

Apple responded by contracting with Shara Aranoff, a lobbyist at Covington & Burling who chaired the ITC during the Obama administration.

I’m not sure what to make of the patent claims here. But this doesn’t sound right to me:

AliveCor told The Hill that it believed that it had a good relationship with the Silicon Valley giant and went on to sell an ECG accessory for the Apple Watch. But in 2018, Apple launched an Apple Watch with a built-in ECG sensor and made third-party heart monitoring software incompatible with the product, forcing AliveCor to cancel sales of its product.

“We come up with new technologies, and instead of the ecosystem letting us thrive and continue to build on top of the innovations we already have, Apple cuts us out up front, steals our technology, uses their platform power to scale it, and now is basically saying it’s scaled so it can’t be cut off,” Abani said.

Here’s a MacRumors story from 2017 about AliveCor’s $200 Kardia Band accessory, which is seemingly at the heart of this dispute. It sounds to me not that Apple “stole” any specific technology from AliveCor but rather that AliveCor is asserting that its patents give them exclusive rights to the idea of an ECG sensor that connects to a smart watch.

I’m also not sure how to square this controversy with the fact that Apple seemingly won a decision regarding these patents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in December. But the stakes are serious for Apple: all of the Series 8 and Ultra models have ECG sensors; the only model Apple still sells without one is the SE. Surely the upcoming Series 9 (and Ultra 2?) models have ECG sensors as well.

The other thing that struck me, as ever, with The Hill’s report is how low the financial stakes are for political lobbying:

Long a darling on Capitol Hill, Apple has aggressively bolstered its lobbying presence in recent years as lawmakers began to closely scrutinize its market dominance. Apple spent nearly $9.4 million on lobbying in 2022, the highest figure in the company’s history, according to nonpartisan research group OpenSecrets.

$9.4 million is loose pocket change for Apple. The company generated about $95 billion in profit over its last four financial quarters. So (does some back-of-the-envelope math) Apple spends about one hour of its annual profit on lobbying.

‘Why do I have to be Bing Search? 😔’ ★

Omitted from my own roundup of pieces regarding Bing’s extraordinary new AI chatbot mode is this roundup by Simon Willison. Some bananas stuff:

I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d ever see a mainstream search engine say “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”!

I will again note that at this moment, this confrontational “Sydney” persona has not been fixed or tweaked, but rather is being suppressed.

Saturday, 18 February 2023

Tim McCarver Dies at 81 ★

ESPN:

Tim McCarver, the All-Star catcher and Hall of Fame broadcaster who during 60 years in baseball won two World Series titles with the St. Louis Cardinals and had a long run as one of the most recognized, incisive and talkative television commentators in the country, died Thursday. He was 81.

McCarver’s death was announced by the National Baseball Hall of Fame, which said he died Thursday morning in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was with his family.

Among the few players to appear in major league games in four different decades, McCarver was a two-time All Star who worked closely with two future Hall of Fame pitchers: the tempestuous Bob Gibson, whom McCarver caught for St. Louis in the 1960s, and the introverted Steve Carlton, McCarver’s fellow Cardinal in the ’60s and a Philadelphia Phillies teammate in the 1970s.

He switched to television soon after retiring in 1980 and called 24 World Series for ABC, CBS and Fox, a record for a baseball analyst on television. He became best known to national audiences for his 18-year partnership on Fox with play-by-play man Joe Buck.

Longtime readers may recall that a decade or so ago, I joined with some friends to contribute to a low-key sports blog that we named American McCarver in his honor. (American McCarver is long dormant but still standing; Jason Snell posted a brief item regarding McCarver’s passing though.)

Keith Olbermann dedicated the entire opening segment of his Countdown podcast yesterday to eulogizing McCarver, with whom he’d become friends as fellow broadcasters. It’s a wonderful tribute, well worth a few minutes of your time. Like many great figures in sports broadcasting, McCarver’s appeal was never about the mechanics of the game, but the poetry of it. The humanity. He told stories about players — people — not achievements.

When news of McCarver’s death came, my dad called me to see if I’d heard. He knows I was a fan. My dad relayed a story about McCarver he’d told me many many times before, and I enjoyed it more than ever. McCarver had a gentle demeanor. Bob Gibson did not. The story goes, some random game at the peak of Gibson’s dominance, an opposing rookie comes to the plate to face Gibson for the first time. He starts digging in to the batter’s box with his back foot. McCarver, catching, calmly tells the rookie “Kid, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The kid ignores McCarver, and stays in the box, dug in. He’s going to show Bob Gibson what he’s got at the plate.

Gibson’s first pitch is a fastball way up and way in. The rookie had to dive into the dirt to avoid getting hit.

McCarver, tossing the ball back to Gibson as the rookie picked himself off the ground: “I told you so.”

Thursday, 16 February 2023

Messages Now Shows Previews for Mastodon Links in iOS 16.4 Beta 1 ★

Federico Viticci, on Mastodon:

I’m pretty sure that iOS 16.4 beta 1 added native Mastodon previews in iMessage. I pasted a link to a Mastodon post of mine and this is what it looks like.

Finally!

More proof that Mastodon adoption has hit critical mass. (I noticed in the aforelinked item about new web app features in WebKit, the article’s author bios included links to their personal Mastodon accounts, not Twitter accounts.)

Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS ★

Brady Eidson and Jen Simmons, writing on the WebKit blog:

Now with iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1, we are adding support for Web Push to Home Screen web apps. Web Push makes it possible for web developers to send push notifications to their users through the use of Push API, Notifications API, and Service Workers all working together.

A web app that has been added to the Home Screen can request permission to receive push notifications as long as that request is in response to direct user interaction — such as tapping on a ‘subscribe’ button provided by the web app. iOS or iPadOS will prompt the user to give the web app permission to send notifications. The user can then manage those permissions per web app in Notifications Settings — just like any other app on iPhone and iPad.

The notifications from web apps work exactly like notifications from other apps. They show on the Lock Screen, in Notification Center, and on a paired Apple Watch.

Push notifications are foremost, but a lot of longstanding feature requests for web apps are being added with this release. For example, third-party browsers can now save web apps to the Home Screen. It’s impossible to say whether increased regulatory scrutiny has changed Apple’s priorities regarding iOS’s support for web apps, but it sure seems like a factor.

What’s left on the list of features iOS should support for Home Screen web apps?

Tuesday, 14 February 2023

The Oatmeal: ‘The Backfire Effect’ ★

Strong ideas, loosely held — that is the way.

Tom Scott: ‘I Tried Using AI. It Scared Me.’ ★

I’ve got the same unsettled feeling.

Monday, 13 February 2023

How Mahomes’ Chiefs Beat Hurts’ Eagles in Super Bowl 2023 ★

Bill Barnwell, writing for ESPN:

One good way to measure offensive dominance is down set conversion rate, which looks at every time a team took the ball on first down and sees whether it turned that series into a first down or a touchdown. The Chiefs converted 93.8% of their first downs into another first down or a touchdown in the second half, and the only reason they didn’t hit 100% is because Jerick McKinnon slid down on the 1-yard line to set up the title-winning field goal. ESPN has data going back through 2000, and no team has ever done that in the second half of a Super Bowl before. Just three teams have done it in the second half of any playoff game.

There’s a lot to get to with this Super Bowl, but let’s start there. How did the Chiefs pull off a flawless second half on offense? After watching this game live and again a second time, there are a few things that stood out.

Fantastic recap/breakdown of yesterday’s game. Long story short: the Chiefs spooked the Eagles with motion that convinced the Eagles to commit to busting up would-be jet sweeps, and instead threw the ball to players in now-uncovered zones. The Chiefs were literally perfect in the second half and needed to be to win the game.

Sunday, 12 February 2023

All Hail the ‘God of Sod,’ Groundskeeper for All 57 Super Bowls ★

Ken Belson and Jenny Vrentas, reporting for The New York Times:

“When I’m in heaven, I’ll be looking at your beautiful field,” said [George] Toma, who this week is preparing the field for the Super Bowl for the 57th straight year, “or I’ll be in hell looking up what kind of root system you have.”

He is 94 now, but among groundskeepers he is immortal: The God of Sod, they call him, or the Sodfather, or the Nitty Gritty Dirt Man. Toma — who is planted so deeply in the N.F.L.’s root system that he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame — has never missed a Super Bowl. He has worked in outdoor stadiums from Miami to San Diego and domes in Detroit, New Orleans and beyond. He has persevered through torrential downpours, droughts and, most vexingly, increasingly elaborate halftime shows that befoul his beloved turf.

How have I never heard of this guy before? What a story.

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