Linked List: January 25, 2022

Tuesday, 25 January 2022

Google Kills FLoC, Unveils ‘Topics’, a New Plan to Replace Tracking Cookies ★

Paul Wagenseil, writing for Tom’s Guide:

Google has ditched its planned user-profiling system, FLoC, and is instead developing a new system called Topics, the company announced today.

Topics, described by Google Senior Director of Product Ben Galbraith as “one of the most ambitious efforts we’ve ever undertaken” during a conference call with reporters, is meant to replace third-party advertising cookies in Chrome by the end of next year. [...]

Topics seems pretty different from FLoC, which stood for Federated Learning of Cohorts. FLoC was intended to analyze your browsing data and place you in one of several thousand “cohorts” made up of Chrome users with similar interests. By comparison, Topics seems more general and should give websites and advertisers much fuzzier data about individual users.

Here’s the thing I don’t understand about this new Topics proposal: Is it baked into the browser? That’s how I’m reading it, and I suspect that means it will wind up being Chrome-only. Why would any other browser support an ad tech proposal that was designed by Google to primarily benefit Google’s own advertising needs.

What happens if a website is dependent on Topics for advertising revenue and you’re using any browser other than Chrome? Will the site try to block you and tell you to switch to Chrome, the way so many sites today try to block you and tell you to disable your privacy blocker?

(If someone out there understands this proposal and it doesn’t require browsers to support it, let me know.)

German Publishers Run Crying to E.U. Regulators Over Google’s Plan to Remove Third-Party Cookies From Chrome ★

Javier Espinoza, reporting for The Financial Times:

Google is facing a fresh complaint from Germany’s largest publishers and advertisers, which are demanding that the EU intervene over the search giant’s plan to stop the use of third-party cookies. Axel Springer, the publisher of titles such as Bild and Politico, is among the hundreds of publishers, advertisers and media groups that have argued to the bloc’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, that Google is breaking EU law with its move to phase out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by next year.

What a pile of horseshit. Third-party cookies have proven to be a privacy disaster and other major browsers have already removed support for them — including Safari, Firefox, and Brave. Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world and thus the biggest holdout, and these clowns want the EU’s regulators — a group that would have us believe it is concerned foremost with consumers — to force Google to keep third-party cookie support enabled in Chrome. If the EU doesn’t toss this case out, it’s a joke.

The decision blocks advertisers, publishers and intermediaries from analysing users’ preferences while they browse online content — a critical blow to how the industry generates revenues.

This editorializing from the FT is simply wrong. Publishers aren’t third parties, so they’re free to analyze users’ preferences while those users are on the publishers’ own sites. But what they’re asking for here is for the EU to force Google to allow them to keep “analyzing users’ preferences” while users are anywhere and everywhere else on the web. Just because publishers have been able to profit from surveillance advertising doesn’t mean they have any entitlement whatsoever to keep profiting from it. As I quipped last year, it’s like pawn shops suing to keep the police from cracking down on a wave of burglaries.

“Publishers must remain in a position where they are allowed to ask their users for consent to process data, without Google capturing this decision. Google must respect the relationship between publishers and users without interfering,” said the document, which was also sent to the EU’s powerful competition unit.

Publishers aren’t third parties, so publishers are free to use their own cookies.

Google said: “Many other platforms and browsers have already stopped supporting third-party cookies but Google is the only one to do this openly and in consultation with technical standards bodies, regulators, and the industry, while also proposing new, alternative technologies.”

True!

Google Drops Support for the Pixel 3 ★

Aaron Gordon, writing for Vice:

Not quite three years ago, I bought a Pixel 3, Google’s flagship phone at the time. It has been a good phone. I like that it’s not too big. I dropped it a bunch, but it didn’t break. And the battery life has not noticeably changed since the day I got it. [...] But I have to get rid of it because Google has stopped supporting all Pixel 3s. Despite being just three years old, no Pixel 3 will ever receive another official security update. [...]

But for the past six years, Google has made the Pixel line of phones. They are Google-made phones, meaning Google can’t blame discontinuing security updates on other manufacturers, and yet, it announced that’s exactly what it would do.

As Gordon points out, iOS 15 supports iPhones back to the 6S, which debuted in September 2015, and the original SE, which shipped six months later. (Both the 6S and original SE are based on the A9 chip.)

Update: My theory for this disparity is simple. A lot of people obsess over “planned obsolescence” — the idea that device makers purposefully make several-years-old devices slower or stop issuing software updates for them to drive users to purchase new devices to replace the existing one. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, at least with Google’s Pixel phones. If it were easy to support older Pixels with the latest version of Android, I firmly believe Google would do it. The problem is it’s not easy. In fact it’s very difficult, on both the hardware and software sides. On the hardware side, the device maker needs to be looking more than half a decade ahead. On the software side, engineers need to be looking more than half a decade behind. It’s not spite that leads to Google (and Samsung, and everyone else) supporting their own phones for only two major OS releases after launch, it’s laziness and indifference. Apple is the only phone maker in the world willing to do the hard work to support their devices for five or more years. That’s a fact.

The New York Times Is Just Fucking With Us Now ★

Julie Creswell, reporting (supposedly) for The New York Times Friday in a story about inflation hitting fast food:

On a chilly Tuesday afternoon this month, James Marsh stopped by a Chipotle near his suburban Chicago home to grab something to eat.

It had been a while since Mr. Marsh had been to Chipotle — he estimated he goes five times a year — and he stopped cold when he saw the prices.

“I had been getting my usual, a steak burrito, which had been maybe in the mid-$8 range,” said Mr. Marsh, who trades stock options at his home in Hinsdale, Ill. “Now it was more than $9.”

He walked out.

“I figured I’d find something at home,” he said.

Everything about this is just pure bullshit, right down to the dramatic one-sentence-per-paragraph pacing.

NBC Will Not Broadcast This Year’s Super Bowl in 4K ★

Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge:

The 2022 Super Bowl won’t be broadcast or streamed in 4K again this year when the game takes place on February 13th, NBC Sports has confirmed to The Verge. The lack of a 4K stream marks the second year in a row that the big game won’t be available with the higher level of picture quality. “The game will not be in 4K,” Dan Masonson, a spokesperson for NBC Sports, told The Verge.

NBC, which is hosting the big game this year, has never actually aired an NFL game in 4K or HDR before, despite hosting the nationally televised Sunday Night Football game every week during the regular NFL season. NBC, for what it’s worth, isn’t the only network: CBS doesn’t produce any of its games in 4K (the network cited COVID-19 issues for the lack of a 4K Super Bowl in 2021), nor does ESPN with Monday Night Football.

Bonus points to any electronics retailer that runs a promotion encouraging people to buy an 8K TV in time for “The Big Game”.

Update: Samsung scores the bonus points.

Bloomberg: ‘Nvidia Quietly Prepares to Abandon $40 Billion Arm Bid’ ★

Ian King, Giles Turner, and Peter Elstrom, reporting for Bloomberg:^*

Nvidia Corp. is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of Arm Ltd. from SoftBank Group Corp. after making little to no progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said.

Good news for Intel, if true.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and their only ostensibly substantial follow-up contained not one shred of evidence to back up their allegations. Bloomberg seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract “The Big Hack” or provide evidence that any of it was true.