Linked List: May 15, 2024

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

Instagram Cofounder Mike Krieger Joins Anthropic as Chief Product Officer ★

Mike Krieger:

Anthropic’s research continues to be at the forefront of AI. When paired with thoughtful product development, I [see] tons of potential to positively impact how people and companies get their work done. And as a two time entrepreneur, I’m particularly excited by how Claude, along with the right scaffolding and product features, can empower more people to innovate at a faster pace and at a lower cost.

Tangentially related: Anthropic shipped a native iOS Claude app two weeks ago.

Save the Date: The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 7:00 pm PT
Tickets: On sale soon
Special Guest(s): Working on it...
Previous Shows: On YouTube

Apple Stiffs Researcher on Bounty for iOS Kernel Vulnerability [Update: Resolved] ★

“Meysam”, on Twitter/X:

I reported CVE-2024-27804, an iOS/macOS kernel vulnerability that leads to the execution of arbitrary code with kernel privileges.

Will publish the POC soon.

Maybe there’s more to this story, but it sure is a bad look for a $3 trillion company to have a reputation for finding technicalities to avoid paying bug bounties.

I would think Apple would want to err on the side of being liberal with bug bounty payouts, to encourage researchers to report as many as they can find.

Update: Meysam:

seem Apple have concluded that the reported CVE is not exploitable and they are planning to update the description to accurately describe the issue as an unexpected system termination rather than arbitrary code execution, but for good faith they will reward me $1000.

And to be clear, Meysam seems genuinely happy with this resolution.

StopTheMadness Pro ★

The previous item was a good reminder that I haven’t linked to StopTheMadness in a while. I first recommended it back in 2018, and mentioned it again in 2022 after developer Jeff Johnson added a font substitution feature at my request. As I wrote then:

It’s such a little thing, and I know most people can’t detect the differences between Helvetica and Arial and don’t care, but it makes me so happy every day never to see the cursed fonts Arial and Courier New.

StopTheMadness Pro does so much more than that. I’ve been using it for so long now that I’m taken aback when I use a factory-fresh no-extension installation of Safari. StopTheMadness Pro is a canonical example of a great power user utility, and Johnson updates it with new features (and new workarounds for web development dark patterns) regularly.

$15 one-time purchase, with support for iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS — and (optional) iCloud sync for shared settings across all your devices. Highly recommended.

Jeff Johnson: ‘Apple Started Cheating Me Out of App Store Bundle Purchases’ [Update: Resolved] ★

Jeff Johnson:

I’ve discovered that starting in February, Apple mistakenly subtracts the price of the previously purchased app twice from the proceeds of a “Complete My Bundle” purchase, thereby causing me to take a loss on each such bundle purchase. This accounting change has cost me thousands of dollars over the past few months.

Long story short, Johnson has a years-old Safari extension power user tool called StopTheMadness, which typically cost $10. Last year he released StopTheMadness Pro, which costs $15. Because the App Store doesn’t support upgrade pricing, Johnson created a bundle that includes both versions. Because StopTheMadness Pro is a superset of the non-pro version, the only reason the bundle exists is to allow people who previously purchased the regular version to upgrade to StopTheMadness Pro for the difference between $15 and the price they paid for the regular version.

The way it should work — and for the first few months of the bundle, did work — is that Apple should subtract the price the user originally paid from the $15 price of the bundle. Starting in February, Apple effectively began subtracting the price the user originally paid twice.

Surely this is a bug, not an attempt by Apple to swindle developers. But, how surprised are you that this bug, left unfixed, works in Apple’s favor, not the other way around? If Apple were erroneously paying developers too much, rather than too little, I’m guessing it would be fixed already.

Update: Jeff Johnson, a few hours after I posted:

Good news, everyone!

I just received a phone call from an Apple representative. They confirmed that there was indeed a software bug in the bundle pricing calculation, which was fixed yesterday. They also said that affected developers, such as myself, would be compensated for our lost revenue.

That’s all I know for now. I was told that I would also be receiving a follow-up email later.

The conversation was pleasant, and the Apple representative was very nice about it.

Casey Newton: ‘Google’s Broken Link to the Web’ ★

Casey Newton, with a sharp take on Google’s sprawling announcements at I/O yesterday:

This new approach is captured elegantly in a slogan that appeared several times during Tuesday’s keynote: let Google do the Googling for you. It’s a phrase that identifies browsing the web — a task once considered entertaining enough that it was given the nickname “surfing” — as a chore, something better left to a bot. [...]

This is such a keen observation. Part of what makes the web the web is that it’s very fun. Or at least was, and is supposed to be. The idea that people find it a chore now isn’t a condemnation of Google but the state of the web itself.

Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.

Oof. What a depressing vision.

Apple Announces New Accessibility Features for 2024 ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced new accessibility features coming later this year, including Eye Tracking, a way for users with physical disabilities to control iPad or iPhone with their eyes. Additionally, Music Haptics will offer a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music using the Taptic Engine in iPhone; Vocal Shortcuts will allow users to perform tasks by making a custom sound; Vehicle Motion Cues can help reduce motion sickness when using iPhone or iPad in a moving vehicle; and more accessibility features will come to visionOS. These features combine the power of Apple hardware and software, harnessing Apple silicon, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to further Apple’s decades-long commitment to designing products for everyone.

The timing of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (tomorrow) has turned this into a nice little tradition: each May, Apple gets to sort of unofficially kick off “WWDC season” with these announcements of upcoming accessibility features.