Linked List: March 15, 2023

Wednesday, 15 March 2023

WSJ: ‘U.S. Threatens Ban if TikTok’s Chinese Owners Don’t Sell Stakes’ ★

John D. McKinnon, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

The Biden administration is demanding that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell their stakes in the video-sharing app or face a possible U.S. ban of the app, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move represents a major shift in policy on the part of the administration, which has been under fire from some Republicans who say it hasn’t taken a tough enough stance to address the perceived security threat from TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius — a multiagency federal task force that oversees national security risks in cross-border investments — made the sale demand recently, the people said.

Trump was against TikTok too, but didn’t get this done. (And he tried, corruptly, to work a deal to hand TikTok over to Larry Ellison.) Banning TikTok or forcing the CCP to sell it makes sense both on national security grounds and as tit-for-tat trade policy. China effectively imposes an infinite tariff on U.S. social networks — none of them are available there. The U.S., to date, has imposed a 0 percent tariff on TikTok.

‘The Apple II Age’ ★

Upcoming new book by Laine Nooney:

Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.

The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multi-billion-dollar future. Instead, as historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers — it’s about the rise of everyday users.

Did I preorder a copy immediately? Come on, you know the answer.

Colorado Catholic Group Bought App Data That Tracked Gay Priests ★

Michelle Boorstein and Heather Kelly, reporting for The Washington Post:

A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. [...]

One report prepared for bishops says the group’s sources are data brokers who got the information from ad exchanges, which are sites where ads are bought and sold in real time, like a stock market. The group cross-referenced location data from the apps and other details with locations of church residences, workplaces and seminaries to find clergy who were allegedly active on the apps, according to one of the reports and also the audiotape of the group’s president.

Sherman said police departments have bought data about citizens instead of seeking a warrant, domestic abusers have accessed data about their victims, and antiabortion activists have used data to target people who visit clinics.

But Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, said the Burrill story was the first time he had heard of a private group buying commercial data and using it against a specific individual.

Makes me wonder how often this technique is being used to blackmail people. This group was targeting gay priests to out them; they could have just as easily blackmailed them.

OpenAI’s GPT-4 Teaser Video ★

A tangential detail regarding this 3-minute video: despite including people from Microsoft talking about their partnership with OpenAI, of the dozens of laptops shown, all of them are MacBooks.

Facebook to Lay Off 10,000 More Employees ★

Mark Zuckerberg, in a company-wide memo:

Here’s the timeline you should expect: over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates. With less hiring, I’ve made the difficult decision to further reduce the size of our recruiting team. We will let recruiting team members know tomorrow whether they’re impacted. We expect to announce restructurings and layoffs in our tech groups in late April, and then our business groups in late May. In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes. Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven’t yet hired.

Keep in mind that Facebook’s headcount increased 2.4× (from 36K to 87K) between 2018 and 2022.

Leaner is better

Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects.

It seems like someone should have bought Zuckerberg a copy of Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man Month a few years ago.

‘BlackBerry’ Trailer ★

Not a documentary, but a fictionalized telling of the rise and fall of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion. Sort of like Titanic, we know how it ends, but sometimes knowing the ending makes for a more compelling story. (Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie is unrecognizable.)

FTC Finalizes Order Requiring Epic Games to Pay $245 Million for Tricking Users Into Making Unwanted Charges ★

The Federal Trade Commission:

The Federal Trade Commission has finalized an order requiring Epic Games, the maker of the Fortnite video game, to pay $245 million to consumers to settle charges that the company used dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases and let children rack up unauthorized charges without any parental involvement.

In a complaint announced in December as part of a settlement package with Epic, the FTC said that Epic deployed a variety of design tricks known as dark patterns aimed at getting consumers of all ages to make unintended in-game purchases. Fortnite’s counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration led players to incur unwanted charges based on the press of a single button. The company also made it easy for children to make purchases while playing Fortnite without requiring any parental consent. According to the FTC’s complaint, Epic also locked the accounts of customers who disputed unauthorized charges with their credit card companies.

Sure would be great if Apple were forced to allow these guys to run an entire app store for iOS.

Petey: ChatGPT App for Apple Watch ★

Briefly known as “WatchGPT” but now renamed to Petey (because the App Store is cracking down on apps with “GPT” in their names, as it’s a registered trademark of OpenAI), this is a simple, super easy-to-use ChatGPT app for Apple Watch by Hidde van der Ploeg. I’ve been using it for a week or so and it’s occasionally been genuinely handy, especially if you keep it on an easily-accessed watch face complication. With other devices, you can just search the web for answers to questions. Oftentimes, when you ask a question to Siri, you get redirected to a web search. But if all you have handy at the moment is your watch, a web search is useless. Petey gives good answers to a lot of questions. I dig the simple aesthetic too — using SF Mono for the type gives the app an appropriately robotic feel.

$5 one-time purchase in the App Store. Worth it. (Privacy policy: “The developer does not collect any data from this app.”)

Noam Chomsky: ‘The False Promise of ChatGPT’ ★

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull, in an essay for The New York Times:

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.