Linked List: June 2024

Sunday, 30 June 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Curiously Short Episodes’ ★

John Moltz returns to the show for a holiday-week look at the best of recent prestige streaming content, particularly Apple TV+. And, yes, a bit on the latest Apple/EU/DMA drama.

Thursday, 27 June 2024

European Commission Launches Investigation Against Microsoft for Integrating Teams With Office ★

The European Commission:

In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings. The conduct may have prevented Teams’ rivals from competing, and in turn innovating, to the detriment of customers in the European Economic Area.

If confirmed, these practices would infringe Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (‘TFEU’), which prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position.

After the Commission opened proceedings in July 2023, Microsoft introduced changes in the way it distributes Teams. In particular, Microsoft started offering some suites without Teams. The Commission preliminarily finds that these changes are insufficient to address its concerns and that more changes to Microsoft’s conduct are necessary to restore competition.

I can see the argument from regulatory proponents, that unbundling Teams from Office in some packages, after the fact, is too little too late. That the damage from abusing their dominant position was already done. But still, what more does the EC want?

The sending of a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the outcome of an investigation.

Translation: They’re guilty and we’re just going through the motions of giving them a chance to state their case.

If the Commission concludes, after the company has exercised its rights of defence, that there is sufficient evidence of an infringement, it can adopt a decision prohibiting the conduct and imposing a fine of up to 10% of the company’s annual worldwide turnover. The Commission may also impose on the company any remedies which are proportionate to bring the infringement effectively to an end.

My read on this is that the EC’s stance is that its designated gatekeeping companies — all of which happen, by sheer coincidence I’m repeatedly told, to be from the US or Asia — should be forbidden from evolving their platforms to stay on top. That churn should be mandated by law.

I mean of course Microsoft had an advantage by being able to bundle Teams with Office. But Office needs something like Teams to remain relevant today. If Office had never evolved after achieving a dominant position in the market, it would still be sold in boxes full of floppy disks. Moving from licensed installations to SaaS was inevitable if Office was to remain relevant, and adding a collaborative communication layer like Teams was essential in today’s world.

The EC, to my eyes, is saying that it’s illegal for a successful platform to adapt and evolve. Or at the very least they’re saying they might deem it illegal. And once again it’s the EC itself that is proclaiming its threat to fine Microsoft up to 10 percent of its annual global revenue, and I’ll wager, once again, that the EU itself comprises less than 10 percent of Microsoft’s revenue. They’re threatening fines incommensurate with their market size.

I think the EC expects these companies to capitulate. To bend their entire global strategy to the whims of EC bureaucrats, and just accept being handcuffed. But what’s clearly happening is that the these gatekeepers are reading the writing on the wall, and are going to postpone all new features and products in the EU until after they have assurances that they’re compliant under EU law. The EC thinks they’re going to handcuff these companies, but instead all they’re doing is setting the entire EU market months, or even years, behind the rest of the world for new products and services. In some cases those products and services will just never come to the EU at all.

Surely the lesson Microsoft is taking from this is not that they were wrong to bundle Teams with Office, but that they were wrong to offer their integrated service in the EU.

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball and the Talk Show, Summer 2024 Edition ★

Yours truly back in March:

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

This is now true, once again for next week. And just like in March, sponsorship spots for The Talk Show are open for the summer months as well.

Wednesday, 26 June 2024

The Talk Show: ‘150 Million Calculator Apps’ ★

Quinn Nelson, esteemed host of Snazzy Labs, returns to the show to recap the highlights of WWDC: Apple Intelligence, platform updates, and the latest salvos from the EC regarding Apple’s compliance with the DMA.

Tuesday, 25 June 2024

Microsoft Edge Has an ‘Enhanced Security’ Mode That Disables the JIT ★

Sergiu Gatlan, writing for Bleeping Computer in 2021 (thanks to Kevin van Haaren):

Microsoft has announced that the Edge Vulnerability Research team is experimenting with a new feature dubbed “Super Duper Secure Mode” and designed to bring security improvements without significant performance losses. When enabled, the new Microsoft Edge Super Duper Secure Mode will remove Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT) from the V8 processing pipeline, reducing the attack surface threat actors can use to hack into Edge users’ systems.

Based on CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) data collected since 2019, around 45% of vulnerabilities found in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine were related to the JIT engine, more than half of all “in the wild” Chrome exploits abusing JIT bugs.

“Super Duper Secure Mode” was a funner name, but they settled on “Enhanced Security Mode”.

This is why Apple considers BrowserEngineKit — which is complex and requires a special entitlement with stringent requirements to use — necessary for complying with the DMA’s mandate to allow third-party browser engines. JITs are inherently vulnerable. It’s not about known bugs — it’s the unknown bugs.

The anti-WebKit peanut gallery responded to my piece on JITs yesterday with a collective response along the lines of “Who’s to say WebKit’s JIT is any more secure than Chrome’s or Gecko’s?” That’s not really the point, but that answer is, Apple is to say. iOS is their platform and they’ve decided that it’s better for the platform to reduce the attack surface to a single browser engine, WebKit, the one they themselves control. And Apple isn’t saying WebKit as a whole, or its JavaScript JIT compiler in particular, is more secure than Chrome or Gecko. They’re saying, implicitly, that it’s safer to have just one that they themselves are fully responsible for. And that the safest way to comply with the DMA’s mandate to allow third-party rendering engines is via a stringent framework like BrowserEngineKit.

You might think it would be just fine for iOS to work just like MacOS, where you can install whatever software you want. But Apple, expressly, does not. iOS is designed to be significantly more secure than MacOS.

Reuters: Amazon Is Considering $5 Monthly Charge for Improved Alexa ★

Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:

Amazon is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.

Known internally as “Banyan,” a reference to the sprawling ficus trees, the project would represent the first major overhaul of the voice assistant since it was introduced in 2014 along with the Echo line of speakers. Amazon has dubbed the new voice assistant “Remarkable Alexa,” the people said.

A bit of a role reversal here. Apple, which is not known for giving away much for free, isn’t charging users for Apple Intelligence, including ChatGPT integration. Amazon, which is known for ruthlessly pursuing low prices, is, according to this report, looking to charge for an LLM-powered version of Alexa. Maybe that new version of Alexa really is that good? But I sort of think that if they gate this new Alexa behind a paywall, it will just be added to the existing package for Prime.

Speaking of Alexa, though, I’m reminded that Apple’s WWDC announcements didn’t include anything about bringing the new Apple-Intelligence-powered Siri to devices like HomePods or Apple Watches. Let’s say you have an iPhone 15 Pro or buy a new iPhone 16 this fall. What happens when you talk to Siri through your Apple Watch? Do you get the new Apple Intelligence Siri, because your watch is paired to your iPhone, which meets the device requirements for Apple Intelligence? Or do you get old dumb Siri on your Watch and only get new Siri when talking directly to your iPhone?

Gurman Just Pantsed the WSJ on Their Report About Apple and Meta Working on an AI Deal ★

Salvador Rodriguez, Aaron Tilley, Miles Kruppa, reporting for The Wall Street Journal Sunday morning (News+):

In its hustle to catch up on AI, Apple has been talking with a longtime rival: Meta. Facebook’s parent has held discussions with Apple about integrating Meta Platforms’ generative AI model into Apple Intelligence, the recently announced AI system for iPhones and other devices, according to people familiar with the matter.

This didn’t make much sense, given Tim Cook’s strident condemnation of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. E.g. this interview with Kara Swisher, which, though it was six years ago, doesn’t leave much room for a strange bedfellows partnership today: “Asked by Swisher what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, Cook said pointedly: ‘I wouldn’t be in this situation.’” Cook and Apple’s entire problem with Meta is their approach to privacy and monetizing through targeted advertising based on user profiles. Apple is trying to convince customers that Apple’s approach to AI is completely private and trustworthy; a partnership with Meta would run counter to that. And, quite frankly, Meta’s AI technology is not enviable.

Now here’s Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg yesterday evening (News+):

Apple Inc. rejected overtures by Meta Platforms Inc. to integrate the social networking company’s AI chatbot into the iPhone months ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The two companies aren’t in discussions about using Meta’s Llama chatbot in an AI partnership and only held brief talks in March, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The dialogue about a partnership didn’t reach any formal stage, and Apple has no active plans to integrate Llama. [...]

Apple decided not to move forward with formal Meta discussions in part because it doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough, according to the people. Apple has spent years criticizing Meta’s technology, and integrating Llama into the iPhone would have been a stark about-face.

Spokespeople for Apple and Meta declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the two companies were in talks about an AI partnership.

Delicious, right down to the fact that Bloomberg’s link on “reported on Sunday” points not to the Journal but to Bloomberg’s own regurgitation of the WSJ’s report.

Monday, 24 June 2024

European Commission Dings Apple Over Anti-Steering Provisions in App Store, and Opens New Investigations Into Core Technology Fee, Sideloading Protections, and the Eligibility Requirements to Offer an Alternative Marketplace ★

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.

I think what they’re saying here is that Apple’s current compliance offering, where developers can remain exclusively in the App Store in the EU under the existing terms, or choose the new terms that allow for linking out to the web, aren’t going to pass muster. The EC wants all apps to be able to freely — as in free of charge freely — link out to the web for purchases, regardless of whether they’re from the App Store, an alternative marketplace, or directly sideloaded.

The Commission will investigate whether these new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores breach Article 6(4) of the DMA and notably the necessity and proportionality requirements provided therein. This includes:

1. Apple’s Core Technology Fee, under which developers of third-party app stores and third-party apps must pay a €0.50 fee per installed app. The Commission will investigate whether Apple has demonstrated that the fee structure that it has imposed, as part of the new business terms, and in particular the Core Technology Fee, effectively complies with the DMA.

No word on how it doesn’t comply, just that they don’t like it.

2. Apple’s multi-step user journey to download and install alternative app stores or apps on iPhones. The Commission will investigate whether the steps that a user has to undertake to successfully complete the download and installation of alternative app stores or apps, as well as the various information screens displayed by Apple to the user, comply with the DMA.

This sounds like they’re going to insist that Apple make installing sideloaded apps and alternative stores a no-hassle experience. What critics see is Apple putting up obstacles to installing marketplaces or sideloaded apps just to be a dick about it and discouraging their use to keep users in the App Store. What I see are reasonable warnings for potentially dangerous software. We’ll see how that goes.

Perhaps where the EC will wind up is making app store choice like web browser choice. Force Apple to present each user with a screen listing all available app marketplaces in their country in random order, of which Apple’s own App Store is but one, just like Safari in the default browser choice screen.

3. The eligibility requirements for developers related to the ability to offer alternative app stores or directly distribute apps from the web on iPhones. The Commission will investigate whether these requirements, such as the ‘membership of good standing’ in the Apple Developer Program, that app developers have to meet in order to be able to benefit from alternative distribution provided for in the DMA comply with the DMA.

I’m not sure what this is about, given that Apple relented on allowing even Epic Games to open a store. Maybe the financial requirements? Update: OK, this is probably about the other half of the eligibility requirements to offer a marketplace, too. One way to qualify as a marketplace is to provide Apple with a €1,000,000 letter of credit. The other is to “be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS and/or iPadOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” For sideloading, Apple requires that developers “Be a member in good standing of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS and/or iPadOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Apple’s requirements are an attempt to prevent fly-by-night scammers from opening marketplaces or offering nefarious apps for sideloading. But the EC sees that as a catch-22, where the only way to become a marketplace or offer sideloading is to already be a longstanding developer in Apple’s own App Store. So the EC is, I guess, saying don’t worry about fly-by-night scammers, Apple needs to allow any new developer to offer their apps outside the App Store or to provide their own marketplace.

In parallel, the Commission will continue undertaking preliminary investigative steps outside of the scope of the present investigation, in particular with respect to the checks and reviews put in place by Apple to validate apps and alternative app stores to be sideloaded.

This pretty clearly is about Apple using notarization as a review for anything other than egregious bugs or security vulnerabilities. I complain as much as anyone about the aspects of the DMA that are vague (or downright inscrutable), but this aspect seems clear-cut. It’s a bit baffling why Apple seemingly sees notarization as an opportunity for content/purpose review, like with last week’s brouhaha over the UTM SE PC emulator. Refusing to notarize an emulator that uses a JIT is something Apple ought to be able to defend under the DMA’s exceptions pertaining to device security; refusing to notarize an emulator that doesn’t use a JIT seems clearly forbidden by the DMA.

Sunday, 23 June 2024

Kolide by 1Password ★

My thanks to Kolide by 1Password for sponsoring last week at DF. The September 2023 MGM hack is one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent years. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to MGM’s help desk that started it all.

But while it’s true that MGM’s help desk needed better ways of verifying employee identity, there’s another factor that should have stopped the hackers in their tracks. That’s where you should focus your attention. In fact, if you just focus your vision, you’ll find you’re already staring at the security story the pros have been missing.

It’s the device you’re reading this on.

To read more about what they learned after researching the MGM hack — like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story — check out the Kolide by 1Password blog.

Friday, 21 June 2024

Reggie Jackson on Willie Mays’s Legacy, and the Abject Racism Faced by Black Baseball Players in the 1960s ★

The whole 8-minute clip is excellent and worth your time, but do not miss the second half, starting with a sharp question from Alex Rodriguez at the 4:30 mark. Reggie describes, in heartfelt detail, the abject racism he faced as a minor league player as recently as the 1960s. Restaurants he couldn’t eat at. Hotels he couldn’t stay at. Threats to burn to the ground the apartment building where he was sleeping. The pain, over five decades later, remains searing.

Kudos to Fox Sports for airing this. We can’t celebrate progress without honestly facing society’s dark past. (Kudos too, for putting a box of Reggie Bars at the desk. Respect.)

EU Users Won’t Get Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, or the New SharePlay Screen Sharing Features This Year, Thanks to the DMA ★

The Financial Times:

Apple blamed complexities in making the system compatible with EU rules that have forced it to make key parts of its iOS software and App Store services interoperable with third parties.

“Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act,” Apple said on Friday, “we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”

Kudos to Apple for breaking this news to the Financial Times, of all outlets. Poetry in media relations. Here’s the full on-the-record statement, provided to me by an Apple spokesperson:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

None of these features are available yet in the developer beta OS releases, but it is my understanding that the first two — iPhone Mirroring and the new SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements (where you’ll be able to see and doodle on the screens of others, like, say, if you’re providing remote help or how-to instructions to a friend or family member) — will be in the next developer betas, coming early next week. Apple Intelligence won’t even enter beta until later this summer. But in the meantime, even in beta, none of these features will be available within the EU.

The Mac is not considered a “gatekeeping” platform in the EU, but the iPhone and iPad are, and the iPhone Mirroring and screen sharing features obviously involve those platforms. I think Apple could try to thread a needle here and release Apple Intelligence only on the Mac in the EU, but given how inscrutable the European Commission’s interpretation of the DMA is — where gatekeepers are expected to somehow suss out the “spirit of the law” regardless of what the letter of the law says — I don’t see how Apple can be blamed for pausing the rollout in the EU, no matter the platform.

The EU’s self-induced slide into a technological backwater continues.

Thursday, 20 June 2024

Matt Levine on OpenAI’s True Purpose ★

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.

Anthropic Introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet ★

Anthropic:

Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows.

In an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64% of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38%. Our evaluation tests the model’s ability to fix a bug or add functionality to an open source codebase, given a natural language description of the desired improvement. When instructed and provided with the relevant tools, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit, and execute code with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities. It handles code translations with ease, making it particularly effective for updating legacy applications and migrating codebases.

I’ll take them with a grain of self-promoting salt, but the evaluation tests presented by Anthropic position Claude 3.5 Sonnet as equal to or better than ChatGPT-4o. Again: I don’t think there’s a moat in this game.

Also, from the bottom of the post, this interesting nugget:

One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our generative models on user-submitted data unless a user gives us explicit permission to do so. To date we have not used any customer or user-submitted data to train our generative models.

~~Even Apple can’t say that.~~ Follow-Up: “Training Large Language Models on the Public Web”.

Warp’s Agent Mode: Natural Language for Terminal Commands ★

Michelle Lim, writing for the Warp blog (Warp, I’ll note, has previously sponsored DF):

Agent Mode raises the level of abstraction in the terminal. Using natural language, you can ask the terminal to accomplish any high level task without worrying about the specific commands you need.

Agent Mode knows when it needs more information to help you complete a task. It will ask permission to run commands on your machine and use the outputs to guide you, step-by-step. It’s also self-correcting when it runs into errors.

Because Agent Mode executes tasks through the CLI, it integrates with practically any service with zero configuration. If the service has a CLI, an API, or publicly available docs, you can use Agent Mode for the task. Agent Mode has inherent knowledge of most public CLIs, and you can easily teach it how to use internal CLIs by asking it to read their help content.

Man (no pun intended?), is this cool. I just tried “How do I generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” and got:

You can generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following shell command in the Fish shell:
  printf "%04d\n" (random 0 9999)

And when I followed up with “How can I use jot to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” I got:

You can use the jot command to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following command:
  jot -w "%04d" -r 1 0 9999

Both of which answers are correct. For jot — a tool I first learned about, of course, from the inimitable Dr. Drang — I think a simpler, and thus better, answer is:

jot -r 1 0000 9999

but Warp’s Agent Mode suggestion is certainly good enough.

Lacking Votes, EU Postpones Vote on CSAM Law That Would Ban End-to-End-Encryption for Messaging ★

Clothilde Goujard, reporting for Politico:

A vote scheduled today to amend a draft law that may require WhatsApp and Signal to scan people’s pictures and links for potential child sexual abuse material was removed from European Union countries’ agenda, according to three EU diplomats.

Ambassadors in the EU Council were scheduled to decide whether to back a joint position on an EU regulation to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But many EU countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic were expected to abstain or oppose the law over cybersecurity and privacy concerns.

“In the last hours, it appeared that the required qualified majority would just not be met,” said an EU diplomat from the Belgian presidency, which is spearheading negotiations until end June as chair of the EU Council.

Sanity prevails — for now.

‘This $8 Cardboard Knife Will Change Your Life’ ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at The Obsessor:

The cardboard is inescapable if you use Amazon or other online stores, they pile up in the hallways and next to the garbage cans and you triage as you can.

We get so many that I have to break down our boxes in order to fit them in our recycle bin. I’ve used all of the typical tools — scissors, pocket knife, box cutter — and many unconventional ones like drywall saws just trying to make this painful job a bit easier.

The CANARY is uniquely serrated all the way around its edge, like a chainsaw. This makes it incredibly good at cutting cardboard either with or across corrugation with ease. I cannot express how easily this knife cuts cardboard, it’s like slicing through regular old paper, it’s amazing.

Last year when I linked to (and recommended) Studio Neat’s Keen — the world’s best box cutter, but which costs about $100 — at least one reader recommended the Canary. For $8 I figured why not. It truly is an amazing product. I do still love my prototype Keen but for opening and breaking down cardboard boxes, the Canary can’t be beat. It’s both highly effective and very safe.

‘Fast Crimes at Lambda School’ ★

Ben Sandofksy went deep on the history of Lambda School, a learn-to-code startup that aimed to disrupt computer science education, and its founder, Austen Allred:

What set his boot camp apart from the others were “Income Share Agreements.” Instead of paying up-front for tuition, students agreed to pay a portion of future income. If you don’t get a job, you pay nothing. It was an idea so clever it became a breakout hit of Y Combinator, the same tech incubator that birthed Stripe, AirBnb, and countless other unicorns.

When Lambda School launched in 2017, critics likened ISAs to indentured servitude, but by 2019 it was Silicon Valley’s golden child. Every day, Austen tweeted jaw-dropping results. [...]

Things got worse from there, and we’ll get to it. First I need to address a common question: what do I have to do with any of this? I have no professional or personal connections to the company or the team. What compelled me to follow this story for the last five years?

On the surface, this is another window into the 2010’s tech bubble, a period where mediocre people could raise ludicrous money amid a venture capitalist echo chamber fueled by low-interest rates. But what makes this any worse than Juicero, Clinkle, or Humane? Why does this rise to the level of Theranos?

These stories hinge on their villains, whose hubris and stupidity end in comeuppance. Theranos had Elizabeth Holmes, Fyre Festival had Bobby McFarlane, and Lambda School has Austen Allred.

Independent journalism at its best.

Apple ID to Be Renamed to Apple Account ★

Adam Engst, TidBITS:

The real problem comes when tech writers document features across multiple versions of Apple’s operating systems. We’ll probably use both terms for a while before slowly standardizing on the new term. Blame Apple if you see awkward sentences like “Continuity features require that you be logged into the same Apple Account (Apple ID in pre-2024 operating systems).” Or maybe writers will compress further to “Continuity features require that you be logged into the same Apple Account/ID.”

I do think “Apple Account” is a better name, so I think the transitional pain is worthwhile.

Wednesday, 19 June 2024

Perplexity AI Is Lying About Their User Agent ★

Robb Knight:

I put up a post about blocking AI bots after the block was in place, so assuming the user agents are sent, there’s no way Perplexity should be able to access my site. So I asked:

What is this post about https://rknight.me/blog/blocking-bots-with-nginx/

I got a perfect summary of the post including various details that they couldn’t have just guessed. Read the full response here. So what the fuck are they doing?

I checked a few sites and this is just Google Chrome running on Windows 10. So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string. I can’t even block their IP ranges because it appears these headless browsers are not on their IP ranges.

Terrific, succinct write-up documenting that Perplexity has clearly been reading and indexing web pages that it is forbidden, by site owner policy, from reading and indexing — all contrary to Perplexity’s own documentation and public statements.

Wired: ‘Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine’ ★

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, reporting for Wired (News+ link):

A Wired analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight suggest that Perplexity is able to achieve this partly through apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite claiming that it won’t. Wired observed a machine tied to Perplexity — more specifically, one on an Amazon server and almost certainly operated by Perplexity — doing this on wired.com and across other Condé Nast publications.

The Wired analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, is also prone to bullshitting, in the technical sense of the word.

This paints Perplexity as, effectively, an IP theft engine, and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, as a degenerate liar. None of this is an oversight or just playing fast and loose. It’s a scheme to deliberately circumvent the plain intention of website owners not to have Perplexity index their sites. Liars and thieves. Utterly shameless.

A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet; An Encryption Back Door by Any Other Name Would Still Smell Like Shit ★

Signal president Meredith Whittaker, responding to a new initiative in the EU to ban end-to-end-encryption (for some reason published as a PDF despite the fact that Signal has a blog):

In November, the EU Parliament lit a beacon for global tech policy when it voted to exclude end-to-end encryption from mass surveillance orders in the chat control legislation. This move responded to longstanding expert consensus, and a global coalition of hundreds of preeminent computer security experts who patiently weighed in to explain the serious dangers of the approaches on the table — approaches that aimed to subject everyone’s private communications to mass scanning against a government-curated database or AI model of “acceptable” speech and content.

There is no way to implement such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating a dangerous vulnerability in core infrastructure that would have global implications well beyond Europe.

Instead of accepting this fundamental mathematical reality, some European countries continue to play rhetorical games. They’ve come back to the table with the same idea under a new label. Instead of using the previous term “client-side scanning,” they’ve rebranded and are now calling it “upload moderation.” Some are claiming that “upload moderation” does not undermine encryption because it happens before your message or video is encrypted. This is untrue.

Yes, but it’s a great idea to let these same EU bureaucrats design how mobile software distribution should work.

Copilot Plus PCs, Where the ‘Plus’ Means More Dumb Stickers ★

Paul Thurrott on Threads, after getting his new Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge laptop:

Former Windows head Terry Myerson once told me the goal of partnering with Qualcomm on Windows on Arm was to “get those f#$%ing Intel stickers off of PCs.”

Mission accomplished, Terry. There are no Intel stickers on the new Qualcomm-based Copilot+ PCs.

Still covered with stickers. And as Thurrott’s photo hints at, and this screenshot from Tim Schofield’s unboxing video shows clearly, Samsung can’t even be bothered to apply the stickers straight. Looks like they were applied by a little kid. Screams “premium” experience.

Two of these stickers don’t even make sense. The Snapdragon one is obviously paid for by Qualcomm, the same way Intel pays PC makers to apply their stickers. But why would Samsung booger up its own laptops with stickers promoting their own Dynamic AMOLED 2X display technology? And what’s the deal with the Energy Star stickers? Who pays to put those on laptops and why?

Samsung Warns That Their New Snapdragon-Based PCs Aren’t Compatible With Fortnite or Some Adobe Apps ★

Yang Jie and Jiyoung Sohn, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 Edge [sic], which went on sale Tuesday in the U.S., South Korea and some other markets, contains Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. It runs a version of Microsoft’s Windows 11 for PCs that uses technology from U.K.-based Arm.

On Wednesday, Samsung put a notice on its Korean-language product site listing applications that it currently determines are incompatible with the new laptop or can’t be installed. The list included some Adobe software as well as popular games including “League of Legends” and “Fortnite.”

Sounds like maybe Microsoft’s Prism isn’t as good as Apple’s Rosetta 2 after all? Or that Prism isn’t capable of running low-level anti-piracy (Adobe) and anti-cheating (Epic) rootkit-style system extensions?

The issues offer an early hint of the challenges some tech companies may face as they introduce new AI-powered computers and smartphones while seeking to maintain compatibility with existing software.

What an odd paragraph. This has nothing to do with phones, and the only “tech companies” affected are Microsoft, who makes Windows, and PC makers whose machines run Windows and have adopted Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips. Macs made the transition from Intel’s x86 architecture to Apple’s ARM-based Apple silicon without users noticing anything other than dramatically longer battery life and faster performance, including when running x86 software in emulation.

(I put a sic above because Samsung’s new laptops are named “Galaxy Book4 Edge”, with no space between the “Book” and the “4”. Great product name that rolls right off the tongue, as usual, from Samsung.)

FTC Lawsuit Alleges Adobe’s Cancellation Fees Are Illegal ★

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

The government’s heavily redacted complaint laid out Adobe’s alleged scheme, which starts with “manipulative enrollment practices.”

To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.” [...]

Because Adobe allegedly only alerted users to the ETF in fine print — by hovering over a small icon or clicking a hyperlink in small text — while the company’s cancellation flows made it hard to end recurring payments, the FTC is suing and accusing Adobe of deceptive practices under the FTC Act.

Adobe is too good a company to push dark-pattern subscription schemes like this. They should concede, apologize, and eliminate every subscription that isn’t a simple straightforward annual or monthly plan.

Mike Masnick: ‘The Surgeon General Is Wrong; Social Media Doesn’t Need Warning Labels’ ★

Mike Masnick, writing for The Daily Beast:

We put health warnings on things that are inherently harmful, with little redeeming health value. That is, things that are actually toxins: nicotine, lead, poisons.

The complaints here are with speech. [...]

The American Psychological Association released a similar report, concluding: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Instead, it finds that when young people struggle with mental health, their online lives are often just a reflection of their offline lives.

Lots of other research has shown the same thing, yet Murthy’s call for health warnings never mentions all of this research that suggests social media is actually beneficial for many. Instead, he cites a few anecdotes of children who were bullied online. But bullying happened prior to social media, and we did not talk about putting health warnings on telephones or notepads or other forms of communication.

Just pure panic-driven ninny-ism. It’s like the whole nonsense with “trigger warnings”. Masnick brings up Reagan-era Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s nonsensical crusade against video games in the 1980s. I’m also reminded of Tipper Gore’s campaign for warning labels on music albums.

OpenAI Expats Found ‘Safe Superintelligence Inc.’ ★

Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy:

We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.

This way, we can scale in peace.

Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures.

We are an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, where we have deep roots and the ability to recruit top technical talent.

Sutskever was the chief scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, who launched a failed coup against Sam Altman earlier this year. I certainly hope they’re more safe than OpenAI is open.

(Via Techmeme.)

‘That’s Odd – Usually the Blood Gets Off at the Second Floor’ ★

Speaking of Louie Mantia, back in 2011 he made a terrific wallpaper of the iconic hallway carpeting from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. He just remade it, with even better color accuracy and texture. And to go along with it, a new wallpaper based on the carpet inside room 237. There ain’t nothing in room 237. But you ain’t got no business going in there anyway. So stay out. You understand? Stay out. But feel free to use the wallpaper.

Louie Mantia on Dark Mode App Icons ★

Louie Mantia:

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it. [...]

Unfortunately, some icons appear to have lost or gained weight in dark mode. For example, the Settings gear didn’t change size in dark mode, but it appears to occupy less space because the dark circle around it blends with its background. That makes it appear smaller than the Find My icon, which now looks enormous next to FaceTime. This is a remnant of some questionable design choices in iOS 7 that have lingered now for the last decade.

That last sentence is the most diplomatic thing I’ve ever heard from Louie. What a splendid post this is — exemplary work to illustrate his advice.

Tuesday, 18 June 2024

Jon Stewart Talks About His Split With Apple on Matthew Belloni’s ‘The Town’ ★

Interesting two-part interview, with far more information than we’ve heard about the demise of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+. Part two is here; Overcast links to parts one and two; Apple Podcasts links to parts one and two.

Some nuggets:

The split seemed very much amicable. Stewart isn’t one to hold back, and he emphasized repeatedly there are no hard feelings. He even professed to getting his morning news in Apple News.
Apple paid the show’s staff for all of season 3, despite cancelling the show before production began. That’s nearly unheard of in the entertainment industry.
Stewart himself admits that season one more or less stunk.

Well worth a listen.

Willie Mays, Greatest Centerfielder in Baseball History, Dies at 93 ★

John Shea, the San Francisco Chronicle:

Willie Mays, the iconic and endearing “Say Hey Kid” who charmed countless fans with his brilliant athleticism and graceful style and was widely considered baseball’s greatest and most entertaining player, died Tuesday of heart failure. He was 93.

“My father has passed away peacefully and among loved ones,” Mays son, Michael Mays, said. “I want to thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart for the unwavering love you have shown him over the years. You have been his life’s blood.” [...]

Mays spent most of his 23-year playing career with the Giants, six in New York and 15 in San Francisco, making him a cherished superstar from coast to coast. He hit 660 home runs, made 24 All-Star appearances and won 12 Gold Gloves, which weren’t given out until Mays’ sixth season.

The consummate five-tool player, Mays was elite at hitting, power hitting, defending, throwing and baserunning, and his ability to out-think and out-smart the competition served as a valuable sixth tool.

My dad was a clerk in the Navy, stationed in New York for a stint in the late 1950s, and they’d give free tickets to servicemen to attend ballgames for all three teams in the city: the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. At the time, all three clubs had centerfielders destined for the Hall of Fame: Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and Mays. My dad has never wavered from his conviction that Willie Mays was the best baseball player he ever saw, hands down. He hit for power and average, ran like the wind, made catches no one else could make, and had a cannon for an arm.

Best ballplayer I’ve seen play was Mays’s godson, Barry Bonds.

Why Dolphin Isn’t Coming to the App Store (Spoiler: It Needs a JIT) ★

“OatmealDome”, developer of an iOS fork of the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin:

Two weeks ago, Apple modified their App Store guidelines to allow retro game emulators in the App Store. This week, Delta, a multi-system emulator that was previously only available via AltStore, was released on the App Store. Since these events happened, we’ve been asked many times if we will submit DolphiniOS (our fork of Dolphin) to the App Store.

Unfortunately, no.

Apple still does not allow us to use a vital technology that is necessary for Dolphin to run with good performance: JIT. [...]

Unfortunately, Apple generally does not allow apps to use JIT recompilers on iOS. The only exceptions are Safari and alternative web browsers in Europe. We submitted a DMA interoperability request to Apple for JIT support, but Apple denied the request a few weeks ago.

Swift Playgrounds is an exception too. Apple trusts itself to use JIT compilation safely, but not third-party developers. That’s not unreasonable — but I’m not sure it’s compliant with the DMA.

Open Source PC Emulator UTM Blocked by Apple for Notarization, Including Through EU Marketplaces ★

Michael Tsai:

This is confusing, but I think what Apple is saying is that, even with notarization, apps are not allowed to “download executable code.” Rule 2.5.2 says apps may not “download, install, or execute code” except for limited educational purposes. Rule 4.7 makes an exception to this so that retro game emulators and some other app types can run code “that is not embedded in the binary.” This is grayed out when you select “Show Notarization Review Guidelines Only”, meaning that the exception only applies within the App Store. Thus, the general prohibition remains in effect for App Marketplaces and Web Distribution. But it seems like this wasn’t initially clear to Apple, either, because the review process took two months.

This also seems inconsistent with the fact that the Delta emulator is allowed to be notarized outside the App Store. It doesn’t make much sense for the rules to be more lax within the App Store. I first thought the mistake was that Apple didn’t mean to gray out 4.7 for notarization. Then everything would make sense. But the clarification states that 4.7 is not intended to apply to notarization.

The bottom line for me is that Apple doesn’t want general-purpose emulators, it’s questionable whether the DMA lets it block them, and even siding with Apple on this it isn’t consistently applying its own rules.

Confusing indeed. Apple’s stance on this seems inscrutable and arbitrary: retro game emulators are, at long last, acceptable, but general PC emulators are not. Such arbitrary policy decisions related to the purpose of the app are fine for the App Store (legally speaking), but clearly not compliant with the DMA. That’s one of the few areas where the DMA is clear. Apple can, of course, ban (say) porno apps from the App Store, but can’t refuse to notarize them for distribution outside the App Store in the EU.

Apple has a security leg to stand on when it comes to JIT compilation, but the version of UTM (UTM SE) that was held up in review for two months, and ultimately rejected by Apple, doesn’t use a JIT. And because it doesn’t use a JIT, performance is poor; hence the UTM developers’ deeming it not worth fighting about. Apple goes into depth on the security challenges pertaining to JIT compilation in its documentation for BrowserEngineKit, the framework for developing non-WebKit browser engines for distribution in the EU. That’s ostensibly the reason why developers need a special entitlement to use a custom browser engine — JavaScript engines need a JIT to perform well but JITs pose a security risk.

In an earlier revision of this post, I suggested that Delta — Riley Testut’s excellent and wildly popular retro Nintendo console emulator for iOS — uses a JIT. There is indeed a JIT in Delta’s source code repository, but Testut informs me that it’s currently only enabled through the version of AltStore distributed through sideloading. Delta’s JIT is removed from the versions of Delta in the App Store and AltStore PAL (the EU app marketplace), because of Apple’s restrictions on JIT compilers. No app with a JIT is going to pass review by Apple, including for distribution outside the App Store in the EU. That restriction should, in theory, be permitted under the DMA on security grounds. But how the no-JIT version of UTM could be rejected for notarization, I do not see.

(Thinking about BrowserEngineKit makes me wonder: Now that over four months have passed since Apple announced its initial DMA compliance plans, has even a single browser developer announced plans to bring their own rendering engine to iOS in the EU? As far as I know the answer is no. It’s entirely possible Apple went to all the trouble of creating BrowserEngineKit for compliance with the DMA, but no one is actually going to use it because no browser developer deems the EU market worth forking their browser for, solely for distribution outside the App Store — while on the hook for the 50-euro-cents-per-download Core Technology Fee if such a browser becomes popular.)

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

To conduct the study, NewsGuard entered prompts asking about narratives known to have been created by John Mark Dougan, an American fugitive who, per the New York Times, is creating and spreading misinformation from Moscow.

Entering 57 prompts into 10 leading chatbots, NewsGuard found they spread Russian disinformation narratives 32% of the time, often citing Dougan’s fake local news sites as a reliable source.

The chatbots presented as fact false reports, originating on those sites, about a supposed wiretap discovered at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and a nonexistent Ukrainian troll factory interfering with U.S. elections.

NewsGuard conducted its research on OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, Grok, Inflection, Mistral, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity.

Certainly worth researching, but I’d have been more surprised if these chatbots did not present Russian misinformation as fact. For chrissake they pass Onion articles, which are intended as parody, as fact. Russian misinformation is written with the intent of convincing the gullible that it’s legit; and LLMs are by nature gullible.

Scroll Reverser for MacOS ★

I use both a mouse and trackpad at my desk, but, for whatever reason, prefer “natural scrolling” with the trackpad, but reverse scrolling with the wheel on my mouse. Apple’s control panels for Mouse and Trackpad don’t allow you to specify different scrolling directions per input device.

But that’s exactly what Scroll Reverser does. It’s a super-simple utility by Nick Moore that does one thing and does it really well. I’ve been recommending it for over 10 years. Free of charge and open source.

Apple Security Research: ‘Private Cloud Compute: A New Frontier for AI Privacy in the Cloud’ ★

Apple:

We designed Private Cloud Compute to ensure that privileged access doesn’t allow anyone to bypass our stateless computation guarantees.

First, we intentionally did not include remote shell or interactive debugging mechanisms on the PCC node. Our Code Signing machinery prevents such mechanisms from loading additional code, but this sort of open-ended access would provide a broad attack surface to subvert the system’s security or privacy. Beyond simply not including a shell, remote or otherwise, PCC nodes cannot enable Developer Mode and do not include the tools needed by debugging workflows.

Next, we built the system’s observability and management tooling with privacy safeguards that are designed to prevent user data from being exposed. For example, the system doesn’t even include a general-purpose logging mechanism. Instead, only pre-specified, structured, and audited logs and metrics can leave the node, and multiple independent layers of review help prevent user data from accidentally being exposed through these mechanisms. With traditional cloud AI services, such mechanisms might allow someone with privileged access to observe or collect user data.

Many details here, but many still to come.

Monday, 17 June 2024

Ming-Chi Kuo Says This Year’s Series 10 Apple Watches Will Increase in Size ★

Ming-Chi Kuo:

The Series 10 will feature form factor upgrades, including larger screen sizes (increasing from 45mm/41mm to about 49mm/45mm) and a thinner design.

Unlike other devices Apple sells, Apple Watch sizes are given not by screen diagonal but by case height. So what Kuo is claiming is that the current “big” size will become the small size and the new big size will be much bigger. I find this very hard to believe. Since its inception Apple Watch has stood out among smartwatches for making models that are appropriate for people with small wrists.

Anecdotally, almost all women I see wearing an Apple Watch are wearing a small one, and I see a fair number of men who’ve chosen the smaller size as well. As I wrote when reviewing the first Apple Watch Ultra, many people are self conscious about wearing a watch that’s “too big” for their wrist. That concern is often misguided — most people look just fine wearing a bigger watch — but it doesn’t change the fact that people are very reluctant to buy a watch that they fear looks too big on them.

Worth noting that three years ago Kuo, along with Mark Gurman, was completely wrong about the design of the Series 7 watches, with both of them claiming it would have flat sides like the iPhone 12. But it’s also worth noting that back in August, Gurman reported that year’s watches would introduce a new band system that breaks compatibility with existing bands, which, notably, have remained unchanged since Series 0 in 2015. (In fact I’m wearing my space black link bracelet from my own Series 0 on my Series 7 today.)

Apple Discontinuing Apple Pay Later, Just 8 Months After Rolling Out in the U.S. ★

Apple, in a statement to 9to5Mac:

Starting later this year, users across the globe will be able to access installment loans offered through credit and debit cards, as well as lenders, when checking out with Apple Pay. With the introduction of this new global installment loan offering, we will no longer offer Apple Pay Later in the U.S. Our focus continues to be on providing our users with access to easy, secure and private payment options with Apple Pay, and this solution will enable us to bring flexible payments to more users, in more places across the globe, in collaboration with Apple Pay enabled banks and lenders.

This always seemed like a weird offering from Apple. Apple Pay Later did not charge interest, which is great, but it still seemed contrary to the spirit of helping people develop good financial habits. A no-interest loan doesn’t change the fact that in general, you should only buy things you can afford to pay for in full now.

Financial Times Reports EC to Charge Apple With Non-Compliance Under DMA for CTF ★

Javier Espinoza reporting from Brussels, and Michael Acton from San Francisco, for the Financial Times (archive link in case your FT subscription isn’t working):

The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation. The charges would be the first brought against a tech company under the Digital Markets Act, landmark legislation designed to force powerful “online gatekeepers” to open up their businesses to competition in the EU.

The commission, the EU’s executive arm, said in March it was investigating Apple, as well as Alphabet and Meta, under powers granted by the DMA. An announcement over the charges against Apple was expected in the coming weeks, said two people with knowledge of the case. [...]

If found to be breaking the DMA, Apple faces daily penalties for non-compliance of up to 5 per cent of its average daily worldwide turnover, which is currently just over $1bn.

The EC leaks everything to the Financial Times. Reuters points out that EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager leaves office in November. Makes me wonder if there’s a clock-running-out aspect to this. Does the incoming regime share her politics regarding US tech companies?

Forget about trying to figure out what the EC wants from reading the DMA. It doesn’t say. I suspect they want Apple to completely forgo monetization of its IP on iOS — to allow the distribution of iOS apps without any charge or fee whatsoever other than the $99 annual developer program fee. I’m not sure, at all, how Apple is going to respond, but I do not think the EC is going to get that. I also don’t think they’re ever going to collect any significant fines from Apple.

My basic theory is that what the EC has wanted all along is to force Apple not merely to open up iOS to other methods of distribution, but to force Apple to allow apps to be distributed through those non-App-Store channels free of charge. But they don’t want to come out and say, flatly, that they seek to forbid Apple from monetizing its IP from all developers on the platform, because that’s so radically anti-capitalist. So instead they wrote the DMA to forbid the way Apple had, heretofore, mandated its cut of App Store revenue, and I suspect they somehow thought that if they banned the current rules — all apps must go through the App Store, all apps must use Apple’s App Store payment processing — then Apple would be forced to allow free-of-charge distribution through other channels and other payment processing. They didn’t foresee the Core Technology Fee as a route to collect a cut from any and all popular applications distributed by large commercial developers. So they’re just going to say that’s not allowed either, even though it seemingly doesn’t violate anything in the DMA. I don’t know where this winds up because I don’t see Apple conceding this point.

Sunday, 16 June 2024

DetailsPro ★

My thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring last week at DF. DetailsPro brings SwiftUI to designers working on Apple platforms. (What a perfect week for a developer/designer tool to sponsor DF.) Without writing a line of code, you can bring your next idea to life in SwiftUI right from your iPhone. Design apps for the iPhone, on your iPhone. Or use it on your iPad or Mac.

DetailsPro has an easy, approachable interface, built-in templates, and a community of designers who share files. It is very easily to get started — you’ll be up and running in minutes. Designs in DetailsPro are 1:1 SwiftUI, so you can export to Xcode at any time. Intuitive features like side-by-side Dark Mode preview and Repeating Elements — a huge timesaver — use the smarts of SwiftUI to make the process enjoyable.

DetailsPro is available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro. DetailsPro is so good and so fun it makes me want to come up with ideas for new apps just to have an excuse to use it. Download it now and give it a try — it’s free forever up to five files, and very reasonably priced for a professional tool.

Saturday, 15 June 2024

Pixar’s ‘Inside Out 2’ Heads for Historic $140–$150M Box Office Opening ★

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter:

Pixar’s tentpole earned a massive $62 million on Friday, well ahead of expectations and putting the movie on course to open in the $140 million to $150 million range domestically over Father’s Day weekend, one of the top three starts ever for an animated film and the second-best for Pixar. Rival studios believe it could climb as high as $155 million to $160 million, but Disney is being more circumspect. Friday’s haul includes a huge $13 million in Thursday previews.

Great news for a great studio that needed a hit. Maybe we should stop griping about Pixar making sequels and just encourage them to make great films, original or not.

Japan Enacts Law to Mandate Third-Party App Stores, and You’ll Never Guess Which Devices Aren’t Included ★

Kyodo News:

Japan’s parliament enacted Wednesday a law to promote competition in smartphone app stores by restricting tech giants Apple Inc. and Google LLC from limiting third-party companies from selling and operating apps on their platforms.

The law will prohibit the providers of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android smartphone operating systems, app stores and payment platforms from preventing the sale of apps and services that directly compete with the native platforms’ own.

Laws like this are protectionist attacks that specifically target two U.S. companies — Apple and Google. The United States should treat this as a trade war, and reciprocate by passing legislation mandating third-party game stores and payments on game consoles from Sony and Nintendo. See how they like it. It’s patently hypocritical that Japan’s law targets only phones; this law wouldn’t exist if Sony were a player in phones and mobile platforms.

Violations of the new law will bring a penalty of 20 percent of the domestic revenue of the service found to have breached the rules. The fine can increase to 30 percent if the companies do not cease the anticompetitive practices.

Unlike the EU, which believes it can assess fines comprising a hefty percentage of companies’ worldwide revenue (which, in the case of the DMA, I doubt they’ll ever collect), Japan, quite reasonably, only assesses fines on companies’ Japanese revenue.

Ken Kocienda Left Humane ★

Ken Kocienda, who was Humane’s head of product engineering, has left the company. his Twitter bio and LinkedIn profile both state “working on something new”:

Working on something new. Past: Humane, 15 years at , inventor of iPhone autocorrect, author of “Creative Selection”

Kocienda’s book Creative Selection is one of the best insider descriptions of working at Apple ever written, and two years ago he was a splendid guest on The Talk Show.

Never Change, Samsung, Never Change ★

This listing for a vintage Samsung VR400G VHS VCR doesn’t state what year it came out, but it’s a pretty safe bet it was after May 6, 1998.

Thursday, 13 June 2024

Wayne Ma Confirms That Mark Gurman Scooped Him on the No-Cash Apple-OpenAI Deal ★

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information:

Neither Apple nor OpenAI are paying each other to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. Instead, OpenAI hopes greater exposure on iPhones will help it sell a paid version of ChatGPT, which costs around $20 a month for individuals. Apple would take its 30% cut of these subscriptions as is customary for in-app purchases.

Sometime in the future, Apple hopes to strike revenue-sharing agreements with AI partners in which it gets a cut of the revenue generated from integrating their chatbots with the iPhone, according to Bloomberg, which first reported details of the deal. OpenAI leaders have privately said the Apple arrangement could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if things go well, The Information previously reported.

I enjoy how Ma threw in a link to his own report from two weeks ago, but didn’t link to Gurman’s scoop — posted a full day earlier — at Bloomberg. Classy.

Gurman: Neither Apple Nor OpenAI Are Paying for Partnership ★

Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg^*:

Left unanswered on Monday: which company is paying the other as part of a tight collaboration that has potentially lasting monetary benefits for both. But, according to people briefed on the matter, the partnership isn’t expected to generate meaningful revenue for either party — at least at the outset.

The arrangement includes weaving ChatGPT, a digital assistant that responds in plain terms to information requests, into Apple’s Siri and new writing tools. Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said.

Meanwhile, Apple, thanks to OpenAI, gets the benefit of offering an advanced chatbot to consumers — potentially enticing users to spend more time on devices or even splash out on upgrades.

Apple getting this free of charge, in exchange only for the prestige of showing the ChatGPT logo and credit to users of Apple devices who engage the integration, is the Apple-iest negotiation in recent memory. My money says Eddy Cue, Steve Jobs’s favorite co-negotiator, made the deal. (I’d love to take Eddy Cue with me to the dealer when next I buy a car.)

During my show Tuesday night, I asked Federighi, Giannandrea, and Joswiak point blank, “So, who’s paying who in this deal?” (or something to that effect — transcript isn’t done yet), and got nothing more than smiles and shrugs in response. My read on the smiles is that they were smug happy smiles.

Ben Thompson and I recorded today’s episode of Dithering — the world’s favorite 15-minute podcast — yesterday before Gurman’s report dropped, but speculating, we came to the same conclusion, that it seemed likely neither company was paying the other. It makes obvious sense from Apple’s perspective. Not so obvious from OpenAI’s. But if OpenAI’s overriding goal is to cement itself as the leader in world-knowledge LLMs — to become to chatbots what Kleenex is to facial tissues — it makes sense to agree to this just to gain users, some of whom will upgrade to paid accounts. Google, on the other hand, probably wants to be paid by Apple to integrate Gemini. But now Apple can turn to Google — and Anthropic and Mistral and whoever else wants in on this iOS and MacOS integration, like the other default search engines in Safari — and Eddy Cue can tell them “My offer is this: nothing. Not even the $20,000 for the gaming license, which I would appreciate if you would put up personally.”

Back to Gurman:

ChatGPT will be offered for free on Apple’s products, but OpenAI and Apple could still make money by converting free users to paid accounts. OpenAI’s subscription plans start at $20 a month — a fee that covers extra features like the ability to analyze data and generate more types of images.

Today, if a user subscribes to OpenAI on an Apple device via the ChatGPT app, the process uses Apple’s payment platform, which traditionally gives the iPhone maker a cut.

Not traditionally. Always. Apple always takes a cut. One of my few regrets from my interview Tuesday night is not thinking to ask, on stage, whether iOS and Mac users will be able to upgrade from free to paid ChatGPT accounts right in Settings, where, I presume, the ChatGPT account sign-in will be. If so, Apple will surely be getting their 30/15 percent slice of that. And what’s the alternative? Sending users to OpenAI’s website, where Apple would get zilch? That doesn’t sound like Apple.

* 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.

‘The Shamans and the Chieftain’ ★

Timothy Snyder:

The political theory of Trump’s coup attempt is that all that matters is the chieftain. He does not have to win an election, because the chieftain has the right to rule simply because he is the chieftain. Requiring Trump to win an election is thus a provocation. The claim that he should leave office when he loses an election justifies revenge. And of course retribution is Trump’s platform.

The legal theory of Trump’s coup attempt, made explicit in argument before the Supreme Court, is that the chieftain is immune to law. There is magic around the chieftain’s person, such that he need respond only to himself. The words “presidential immunity” are an incantation directed to people in black robes, summoning them to act as the chieftain’s shamans and confirm his magical status.

No issue has ever been more important in the history of the United States, and thus, in the history of democracy itself: Donald Trump lost the election in 2020 and tried, ham-fistedly, to spearhead a coup to remain in power by overthrowing the duly elected government of the nation. If he gets another chance by winning in November, the next coup won’t be as ham-fisted.

This Is Love ★

What a photo. Reminds me of my own father, and the father I try to be myself. Impossible to imagine the former guy expressing such genuine love like this.

‘Apple Aggregates AI’ ★

Ben Thompson:

So what is Apple Intelligence, then? To me the explanation flows directly from Strategy 101: Apple Intelligence is the application of generative AI to use cases and content that Apple is uniquely positioned to provide and access. It is designed, to build on yesterday’s Article, to maximize the advantages that Apple has in terms of being the operating system provider on your phone; and, on the other hand, what it is not is any sort of general purpose chatbot: that is where OpenAI comes in — and only there. […]

To put it another way, and in Stratechery terms, Apple is positioning itself as an AI Aggregator: the company owns users and, by extension, generative AI demand by virtue of owning its platforms, and it is deepening its moat through Apple Intelligence, which only Apple can do; that demand is then being brought to bear on suppliers who probably have to eat the costs of getting privileged access to Apple’s userbase.

It pains me to admit how great a take this is. Nailed it.

Wednesday, 12 June 2024

Mac Virtualization in MacOS 15 Sequoia Now Supports Logging In to iCloud ★

Andrew Cunningham, writing at Ars Technica:

But up until now, you haven’t been able to sign into iCloud using macOS on a VM. This made the feature less useful for developers or users hoping to test iCloud features in macOS, or whose apps rely on some kind of syncing with iCloud, or people who just wanted easy access to their iCloud data from within a VM.

This limitation is going away in macOS 15 Sequoia, according to developer documentation that Apple released yesterday. As long as your host operating system is macOS 15 or newer and your guest operating system is macOS 15 or newer, VMs will now be able to sign into and use iCloud and other Apple ID-related services just as they would when running directly on the hardware.

Nice change. Makes me wonder if this is related to Apple’s use of virtualization to allow security researchers to inspect the OS images for its Private Cloud Computer servers for Apple Intelligence.

(Via Dan Moren.)

Arm, Qualcomm Legal Battle Might Disrupt ‘AI PCs’ ★

Max A. Cherney:

The British company, which is majority-owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group sued Qualcomm in 2022 for failing to negotiate a new license after it acquired a new company. The suit revolves around technology that Qualcomm, a designer of mobile chips, acquired from a business called Nuvia that was founded by Apple chip engineers and which it purchased in 2021 for $1.4 billion.

Arm builds the intellectual property and designs that it sells to companies such as Apple and Qualcomm, which they use to make chips. Nuvia had plans to design server chips based on Arm licenses, but after the acquisition closed, Qualcomm reassigned its remaining team to develop a laptop processor, which is now being used in Microsoft’s latest AI PC, called Copilot+.

Arm said the current design planned for Microsoft’s Copilot+ laptops is a direct technical descendant of Nuvia’s chip. Arm said it had cancelled the license for these chips.

My initial reaction when I see reports of legal disputes like this is “Eh, they’ll settle.” But look at the Apple-Masimo dispute over blood oxygen sensors — that’s still dragging on as we head into summer.

Also: Is there any company that Qualcomm hasn’t gotten into a knock-down, drag-out legal battle with over licensing or patent issues? It’s like, of course Qualcomm is trying to stiff Arm on licensing fees. That’s how Qualcomm rolls.

Tuesday, 11 June 2024

Casey Newton: ‘Apple’s AI Moment Arrives’ ★

Casey Newton, Platformer:

The question now is how polished those features will feel at release. Will the new, more natural Siri deliver on its now 13-year-old promise of serving as a valuable digital assistant? Or will it quickly find itself in a Google-esque scenario where it’s telling anyone who asks to eat rocks?

Impossible to answer at this point, given that none (or almost none?) of the Apple Intelligence features or the ChatGPT integration are enabled in the developer betas. But it feels like the answer is yes, Apple’s new AI features will err on the side of caution, at the risk of feeling pedestrian, rather than turning the “Wow” dial to its maximum setting and delivering glue-on-pizza recipes.

Monday, 10 June 2024

Sandwich Launches Theater for Vision Pro (and Will Livestream The Talk Show Tomorrow) ★

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Earlier this year, Sandwich Vision introduced its first-ever app with the debut of Television. The app lets you watch content on a range of virtual TV sets that you can pin in your real-world environment through Vision Pro.

Television supports viewing your own video files as well as content from YouTube. You can even watch Television with friends synchronously over spatial FaceTime on Apple Vision Pro.

Sometimes, though, you just want to enjoy a film in a proper movie theater setting. What if you could do that for every movie? Enter Theater: the new Apple Vision Pro app that transports you to the perfect venue for movies.

Theater will let you experience the theatrical cinema release feeling (even if the original Star Wars film isn’t showing at your local movie chain). Want to watch a movie at the same time with friends or family who can’t be together in person? Spatial FaceTime makes that possible in Theater.

You know the immersive theater environments in Apple’s own TV app and Disney’s VisionOS app? Theater is like that, but for any video. It’s like watching YouTube on a 100-foot screen from the best seat in a cinema. I’ve been testing it, and it’s so great. I love it. And:

Sandwich is collaborating with the duo at SpatialGen, Michael Butterfield and Zachary Handshoe. See their expertise on display as they produce the first-ever stereoscopic livestream of The Talk Show Live.

The studio is also collaborating with SpatialGen to livestream John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live in stereoscopically-captured 3D video using high-end cameras and lenses. [...]

“I started to think ‘what if John’s audience that can’t be at the California Theater could join us anyway?’ That’s when I pitched the idea to my co-developer, the genius Andy Roth,” Adam [Lisagor] says. “He loved it, he found SpatialGen, and I pitched them the idea. And we had roughly 8 weeks to make this happen, and I can’t believe it all came together.”

Live-streaming an event and making it look good in realtime is hard enough. But doing it in 3D video? That’s new territory, especially considering Apple Vision Pro was just previewed at last year’s WWDC and launched in the United States in February.

“Gruber was fascinated by the idea but a little skeptical it could work — it just seemed too ambitious,” Lisagor adds. “The world’s first livestreamed 3D video event? In an immersive theater environment? Admittedly seems like a pipe dream. But nope, it’s real.”

To be clear, the exclusive way to watch the livestream will be through Theater on Vision Pro. Murphy’s Law willing, it should be pretty cool. We’re still shooting the event with traditional cameras, for a traditional version on YouTube, which will go up later this week.

Saturday, 8 June 2024

Kolide ★

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring DF last week. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.

Even with phishing-resistant MFA, it’s frighteningly easy for bad actors to impersonate end users — in the case of the MGM hack, all it took was a call to the help desk. What could have prevented that attack (and so many others) was an un-spoofable form of authentication for the device itself.

That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates. Kolide’s agent looks at hundreds of device properties; their competitors look at only a handful. What’s more, Kolide’s user-first, privacy-respecting approach means you can put it on machines outside MDM: contractor devices, mobile phones, and even Linux machines.

Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. But Kolide can help close the gaps.

Friday, 7 June 2024

MKBHD Visits Apple’s iPhone Stress-Testing Lab ★

Fascinating stuff. I could watch the super slo-mo footage of iPhones being dropped onto various surfaces for an hour. Also, an interesting brief interview with John Ternus on the tension between making devices more durable vs. making them more easily repairable.

‘Apple Intelligence’ ★

Daniel Jalkut, writing on his Bitsplitting blog one year ago:

Which leads me to my somewhat far-fetched prediction for WWDC: Apple will talk about AI, but they won’t once utter the letters “AI”. They will allude to a major new initiative, under way for years within the company. The benefits of this project will make it obvious that it is meant to serve as an answer comparable efforts being made by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. During the crescendo to announcing its name, the letters “A” and “I” will be on all of our lips, and then they’ll drop the proverbial mic: “We’re calling it Apple Intelligence.” Get it?

Apple often follows the herd in terms of what they focus their efforts on, but rarely fall into line using the same tired jargon as the rest of the industry. Apple Intelligence will allow Apple to make it crystal clear to the entire world that they’re taking “AI” seriously, without stooping to the level of treating it as a commodity technology. They do this kind of thing all the time with names like AirPort, AirPlay, and AirTags. These marketing terms represent underlying technologies that Apple embraces and extends. Giving them unique names makes them easier to sell, but also gives Apple freedom to blur the lines on exactly what the technology should or shouldn’t be capable of.

Was a decent prediction a year ago, but looking even better now. Mark Gurman, today:

The company’s new AI system will be called Apple Intelligence, and it will come to new versions of the iPhone, iPad and Mac operating systems, according to people familiar with the plans. There also will be a partnership with OpenAI that powers a ChatGPT-like chatbot. And the tech giant is preparing to show new software for the Vision Pro headset, Apple Watch and TV platforms.

While we are guessing names, my prediction is they call the new Siri “Siri AI”. I don’t think they’ll abandon the Siri brand, but I think they need a name to say “This is an all-new Siri that is way better and more useful and definitely not so frustratingly dumb.” And what Apple likes to do with names is append adjectives. MacBook Pro. M3 Max. AirPort Extreme (RIP). iChat AV. “Siri” = old Siri; “Siri AI” = new Siri, and when you’re talking to it, you still just address it as “Siri”. That’s my guess. Otherwise I think they just stick with no-adjective “Siri” and swear up and down that it’s actually going to be good this year.

Thursday, 6 June 2024

Getting Closer: Tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024 ★

Still available, but edging each day toward selling out:

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): Yes
Price: $60

At least one fun surprise is in store.

NYT: ‘What Ukraine Has Lost During Russia’s Invasion’ ★

Marco Hernandez, Jeffrey Gettleman, Finbarr O’Reilly, and Tim Wallace, with reporting and imagery for The New York Times:

Few countries since World War II have experienced this level of devastation. But it’s been impossible for anybody to see more than glimpses of it. It’s too vast. Every battle, every bombing, every missile strike, every house burned down, has left its mark across multiple front lines, back and forth over more than two years.

This is the first comprehensive picture of where the Ukraine war has been fought and the totality of the destruction. Using detailed analysis of years of satellite data, we developed a record of each town, each street, each building that has been blown apart.

The scale is hard to comprehend. More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over. Parts of Ukraine hundreds of miles apart look like Dresden or London after World War II, or Gaza after half a year of bombardment.

To produce these estimates, The New York Times worked with two leading remote sensing scientists, Corey Scher of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, to analyze data from radar satellites that can detect small changes in the built environment.

A staggering, sobering work of journalism and data visualization.

Nvidia Hits the $3T Market Cap Club, Passing Apple, Trailing Only Microsoft ★

M.G. Siegler, writing at Spyglass yesterday:

Today, NVIDIA hit the $3T market cap mark and passed Apple in that same metric. NVIDIA is now the second most valuable company in the world, only behind Microsoft. At this rate, they’ll catch them by Friday, just ahead of their 10-for-1 stock split.

The stock run-up has been totally and completely insane. The price is up over 200% in the past year. Over 150% in the past six months alone. Five years ago, NVIDIA’s stock was trading at $36/share. Today it closed at $1,224/share.

Is this sustainable? I mean, no. And it’s not because NVIDIA isn’t a great company. This run is just almost meme stock-like in its frenzy, with shades of Tesla, of course. It has just transformed into this sort of index bet on AI. And while AI is also real, it also can’t sustain the current investment hype surrounding it forever.

But for now, founder Jensen Huang should enjoy this moment.

He should, but one of these companies is not like the others:

	’23 Revenue	’23 Profit	’22 Revenue	’22 Profit
Microsoft	$212 B	$72 B	$198 B	$73 B
Apple	$383 B	$97 B	$394 B	$100 B
Nvidia	$61 B	$30 B	$27 B	$4 B

Ming-Chi Kuo on X, claiming some Being Right Points™ for predicting this three months ago:

The prediction from three months ago has come true. This is not just a comparison of Nvidia and Apple’s stock prices but a contrast between the strong growth trend of AI and the innovation challenges faced by consumer electronics.

One man’s “strong growth trend” is another man’s “hype bubble”. And what exactly are the “challenges faced by consumer electronics”? Even with Nvidia’s exhilarating growth in the last two years, Apple generates over 6× Nvidia’s revenue. Apple’s numbers have not been growing, yes, and that’s a legitimate concern for investors. But Apple’s growth stopped not because interest in phones has slowed but because everyone in the world who can afford one has one. That’s a problem, but that’s a good problem.

(Apple and Nvidia both dipped back under $3T today, for what it’s worth.)

How The Wall Street Journal Fell Behind in the ‘Apple Is Behind on AI’ Arms Race ★

Aaron Tilley, writing for The Wall Street Journal under the headline “How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race” (News+ link):

For those who saw them, the demonstrations inside Apple earlier this decade of a revamped Siri offered a showcase of the amazing capabilities a powerful AI voice assistant could have.

The famed assistant, one of the last projects Apple co-founder Steve Jobs worked on before his death, had been given a total overhaul. Capable of running on an iPhone and without an internet connection, the new Siri impressed people with its improved speed, conversational capabilities and the accuracy with which it understood user commands. Code-named Project Blackbird, the effort also imagined a Siri with capabilities built by third-party app developers, according to people familiar with the work.

Yet a competing project won out in an internal contest ahead of the 10-year anniversary of Siri’s launch. Known as Siri X, the more-modest upgrade involved moving more existing Siri software onto iPhones from remote servers to improve the voice assistant’s speed and privacy. The Siri X enhancement was unveiled in 2021.

Tilley is the WSJ’s Apple beat reporter, and one gets the feeling he was tasked with filing a report with the above headline already written. These opening three paragraphs are the only interesting ones in the entire story. But there’s nothing actually new in them.

Here’s Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information in April 2023 under the headline “Apple’s AI Chief Struggles With Turf Wars as New Era Begins” (archive):

In some cases, Giannandrea’s new hires have run into seemingly impenetrable bureaucratic obstacles. In one example, he in 2019 recruited another close friend, Arthur van Hoff, to explore a project to rewrite Siri from the ground up. Code-named Blackbird, the effort involved creating a lightweight version of Siri, which would delegate the creation of more functions to app developers, said five former Siri employees. The software would run on iPhones instead of in the cloud, which would improve Siri’s speed and performance while enhancing user privacy, they said. Demos of Blackbird prompted excitement among employees on the Siri team because of its responsiveness, they added.

But there was a problem. Blackbird competed with the work of two longtime senior Siri leaders: Alex Acero and Robby Walker, who were responsible for two important teams that helped Siri understand and respond to queries. Acero and Walker pushed for completion of their own project, code-named Siri X, for the 10th anniversary of the voice assistant, which aimed to move the Siri processing software onto the device for privacy reasons.

However, Siri X’s goal was simply to reproduce Siri’s existing capabilities without the more ambitious targets of Blackbird, the people said. Despite that, Acero and Walker won. They assigned hundreds of people to their effort, which subsumed and killed Blackbird. Most of their project was completed in 2021.

Same story, but Ma’s version from 13 months ago included the names of the engineers in charge of the dueling projects.

Back to Tilley’s report at the WSJ yesterday:

Apple has long prided itself on perfection in its product rollouts, a near impossibility with emerging AI models. While OpenAI systems have dazzled more than 180 million users with their generation of writing, images and video, they are prone to occasional errors, often called hallucinations. Apple has had limited tolerance for such issues.

“There’s no such thing as 100% accuracy with AI, that’s the fundamental reality,” said Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “Apple is not compatible with that. They won’t release something until it’s perfect.”

How does this square with the state of Siri as it works today? Does Tilley think today’s Siri, though limited in scope, is “100 percent accurate” and “perfect”?

Don’t know about you, but that’s not my experience.

1Password and Safari ★

Speaking of password management and WWDC, Mitch Cohen, product manager of 1Password, wrote a nice thread a few days ago on Mastodon:

Next week is WWDC, so it’s a good time for a thread about the 1Password browser extension for Safari, its history, challenges, and the future — both what we’re working on and what we’d like to see from Apple, Safari and the web platform at large.

I don’t envy them. They need to deal with bugs, missing APIs, and other complicating factors, and all the while need to be extra careful due to the extraordinary sensitivity of the data users put in 1Password. But while I sympathize, many of the complaints levied against 1Password 8, especially on the Mac, are self-inflicted choices.

The New York Times: ‘How the Humane AI Pin Flopped’ ★

Tripp Mickle and Erin Griffith, with a “not what Humane needed the day after announcing their charging case is a potential fire hazard” report for The New York Times:

Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned.

I realize this is only a passing summary of the meeting, but I would hope that everyone at the company was aware of the AI Pin’s shortcomings. They’re the ones who were most familiar with it! However much trouble Humane is in, they were comically doomed if their own employees needed to be told the AI Pin was not a good product just days before reviews dropped. One would think the real topic of this all-hands was to explain why they shipped what they shipped and what the plan was to make it good.

About a week after the reviews came out, Humane started talking to HP, the computer and printer company, about selling itself for more than $1 billion, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. Other potential buyers have emerged, though talks have been casual and no formal sales process has begun.

I’m going to be insufferable if they sell to HP.

Its setbacks are part of a pattern of stumbles across the world of generative A.I., as companies release unpolished products. Over the past two years, Google has introduced and pared back A.I. search abilities that recommended people eat rocks, Microsoft has trumpeted a Bing chatbot that hallucinated and Samsung has added A.I. features to a smartphone that were called “excellent at times and baffling at others.”

The above paragraph exemplifies the sort of catch-22 corner the media is trying to portray Apple as having been painted into regarding AI. It’s just stated as fact that Apple “has fallen behind in the AI arms race” (that’s from yesterday in the WSJ) but the AI features from the companies Apple has supposedly fallen behind are, on their own, described with words like unpolished, embarrassing, hallucinating, untrustworthy, and even baffling. Like I wrote two weeks ago, isn’t “behind” where you want to be when those who are ahead are publishing nonsense? What is Apple behind on, embarrassing itself and confusing its users?

Many current and former employees said Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno preferred positivity over criticism, leading them to disregard warnings about the Ai Pin’s poor battery life and power consumption. A senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product, they said, while others left out of frustration.

Mr. Chaudhri said his company, which had 250 employees at its peak, encouraged workers to offer feedback. The departures were a natural consequence of transitioning from creating a new device to sustaining it after its release, which he said appealed to “a different type of person.” [...]

In January, Humane laid off about 10 employees. A month later, a senior software engineer was let go after she questioned whether the Ai Pin would be ready by April. In a company meeting after the dismissal, Mr. Chaudhri and Ms. Bongiorno said the employee had violated policy by talking negatively about Humane, two attendees said.

It is the kiss of death for any endeavor, creative or technical, to have a culture where brutally honest internal criticism is not welcome, especially when it goes up the chain. In fact it needs to be the expectation, if you’re pursuing excellence. This is probably one of the reasons why Chaudhri, in particular, is not remembered fondly in Cupertino. The key is to always remember to critique the work, not the person. It’s never personal; it’s always about the work.

From the beginning, current and former employees said, the Ai Pin had issues, which reviewers later picked apart. One was the device’s laser display, which consumed tremendous power and would cause the pin to overheat. Before showing the gadget to prospective partners and investors, Humane executives often chilled it on ice packs so it would last longer, three people familiar with the demonstrations said. Those employees said such measures could be common early in a product development cycle.

I’ll bet “Ice Ice Baby” is within Humane’s budget to license, even pre-acquisition.

Gurman Reports Apple Is (Finally) Breaking Passwords Into a Standalone App for the Mac and iOS ★

Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc. will introduce a new homegrown app next week called Passwords, aiming to make it easier for customers to log in to websites and software, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

This isn’t an all-new app, but rather it’s breaking the Passwords panel out of the Settings app sidebar and into its own proper standalone app. I’ll bet Apple introduces new features, too, but Gurman doesn’t describe any. The Passwords panel in Settings, including the system-wide integrations with Safari and WebKit, already has the scope and breadth of an app. I’ve personally been all-in for many years on using iCloud for my own passwords, authentication codes, and now passkeys. For me it’s proven robust and trustworthy.

Making Passwords its own proper app is overdue, though. Apple tries to manage a good balance with how many standalone apps ship as part of the system on iOS. On the Mac, there’s an easier split: Apple puts a dozen or so of the system’s most-used apps in the Dock by default, and puts 46 apps in the Applications folder, and another 18 nerdier apps in the Utilities sub-folder within Applications. On iOS Apple puts some of its own apps within folders, but that still adds to the visual complexity of the default home screens. Password management is so important, and Apple’s own system is so good, that it deserves more prominence. Making Passwords its own app won’t just make it more discoverable, it will (correctly) set the perception that Apple Passwords is a serious personal security management tool that users should considering adopting.

The M4-in-iPad-Pro Sleuth ★

Speaking of chip surprises in the new round of iPad hardware, here’s a post from “Jamie I” in the MacRumors forums, all the way back on April 14:

We have been expecting M3 iPad Pros for a while now but I was just browsing through some of the rumors and I noticed something interesting.

There was information from a private X account with a proven track record that shared chip identifiers for the new WiFi + cellular iPad Pros and it’s apparently using a T8132 chip. However, T8132 is not the identifier for the M3 chip which is T8122.

In fact, based on the pattern that the M series chips have been following, it seems like it’s the M4 chip.

This was exactly right. It was also two weeks before Mark Gurman’s “I’m hearing there is a strong possibility that the chip in the new iPad Pro will be the M4, not the M3” eye-opener in his Power On column.

New M2 iPad Air Has 9-Core GPU, Not 10-Core as Originally Specified ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Over the weekend, we reported that Apple had updated its website to say the new iPad Air’s M2 chip features a 9-core GPU, despite originally advertising it as a 10-core GPU. An Apple spokesperson has now confirmed this change to 9to5Mac, while also saying that all performance claims remain accurate and were based on a 9-core GPU.

Here’s the full statement from an Apple spokesperson:

We are updating Apple.com to correct the core count for the M2 iPad Air. All performance claims for the M2 iPad Air are accurate and based on a 9-core GPU.

The second part of that sentence is key. Apple is saying that all the performance claims it made about the M2 chip in the iPad Air are accurate, despite the 9-core versus 10-core GPU mix-up. For example, Apple’s claim that the M2 iPad Air is nearly 50% faster than the M1 model still stands.

This is not a big deal, at all, but still — what a surprising mistake from Apple. Really strange.

Wednesday, 5 June 2024

Humane Warns AI Pin Owners to ‘Immediately’ Stop Using Its Charging Case ★

Wes Davis, The Verge:

Humane is telling AI Pin owners today that they should “immediately” stop using the charging case that came with its AI gadget. There are issues with a third-party battery cell that “may pose a fire safety risk,” the company wrote in an email to customers (including The Verge’s David Pierce, who reviewed it when it came out).

Humane says it has “disqualified” that vendor and is moving to find another supplier. It also specified that the AI Pin itself, the magnetic Battery Booster, and its charging pad are “not affected.” As recompense, the company is offering two free months of its subscription service, which is required for most of its functionality.

Ugh. I’m all for cracking jokes at Humane’s expense, but this news fills me with nothing but sincere empathy for everyone at the company. Hardware is so fucking hard. I’m glad that there’s seemingly no news of any actual incidents or injuries, and hope there aren’t any.

eBay Is Dropping Support for American Express ★

The AP:

It’s a notable blow to American Express, whose customers are often the most attractive among merchants and spend the most money per month on their cards. But it’s not the first time merchants have voiced opposition to AmEx’s business practices by walking away, most notably the warehouse chain Costco nearly a decade ago.

“After careful consideration, eBay has decided to no longer accept American Express globally effective Aug. 17 due to the unacceptably high fees American Express charges for processing credit card transactions,” said eBay spokesman Scott Overland, in a statement.

One-off dispute, or the start of a trend?

AmEx has been on an aggressive campaign, under its current CEO Steve Squeri, to be a more universally accepted payment option across all merchants in an effort to combat the negative image that AmEx is less accepted and only available for its cardmembers for travel, dining, high-end shops or in dense urban areas. AmEx says its cards are now accepted at 99% of the places that Visa and Mastercard are accepted in the U.S., a metric it achieved in 2019.

As a longtime Amex cardholder who more or less lives through it, that’s my experience. But a few weeks ago I stopped at a Sonic Drive-In and when I tried to pay, they told me my transaction was rejected, which didn’t sound right. Turns out they don’t accept American Express, and the clerk at the window didn’t know.

Quite the Postscript ★

Me, yesterday:

What’s next for Long, a spot in a Huawei commercial slagging on the Qualcomm modems in iPhones?

Business Insider in 2017:

Justin Long, the actor probably best known for his role as the “I’m a Mac” guy from Apple’s classic TV commercials, is now appearing in a commercial promoting the Huawei Mate 9 Android phone.

How about that. It’s often said of absurdities, “You couldn’t make it up if you tried.” I tried!

Tuesday, 4 June 2024

Apple Held Talks With China Mobile to Bring Apple TV+ to China ★

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas; 9to5Mac has a summary):

Apple was in talks last year to launch its Apple TV+ video streaming service in China via a deal with China Mobile, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, according to people with knowledge of the matter. If successful, the talks would make Apple TV+ the only U.S. streaming service to be available in China, one of the world’s biggest markets. The status of the talks is unknown. [...]

Under the terms of the deal being discussed last year, China Mobile would offer Apple TV+ for a monthly fee and feature Apple’s video content prominently on Mobile HD, a set-top box that is included with China Mobile’s broadband service. Apple and China Mobile would split revenue from Apple TV+ subscriptions, the person said.

Apple charges $9.99 for its video streaming service in the U.S., but it would likely have to charge less in China due to the weaker purchasing power of its consumers. For example, Apple Music costs only $1.55 a month in China, compared with $10.99 in the U.S. Video-streaming subscription services in China cost anywhere from between $3 to $5 a month on average.

Ma focuses on the business implications of such a deal. My mind wonders about the content implications. Remember this report by Alex Kantrowitz and John Paczkowski for BuzzFeed News back in 2019, with the subhead “We thought trade would bring Western values to China. Instead, it brought Chinese values to Apple”:

In early 2018 as development on Apple’s slate of exclusive Apple TV+ programming was underway, the company’s leadership gave guidance to the creators of some of those shows to avoid portraying China in a poor light, BuzzFeed News has learned. Sources in position to know said the instruction was communicated by Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of internet software and services, and Morgan Wandell, its head of international content development. It was part of Apple’s ongoing efforts to remain in China’s good graces after a 2016 incident in which Beijing shut down Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies six months after they debuted in the country. [...]

Apple’s tiptoeing around the Chinese government isn’t unusual in Hollywood. It’s an accepted practice. “They all do it,” one showrunner who was not affiliated with Apple told BuzzFeed News. “They have to if they want to play in that market. And they all want to play in that market. Who wouldn’t?”

I wouldn’t. To hell with the money. The entire rest of the world is more than large enough. It’s a disgrace to have rules in place to avoid upsetting the thin-skinned tyrants who rule the largest totalitarian regime in the history of the world. How is it anything less than cowardice to forbid portraying China as the villains in a movie or show when the CCP is, in fact, villainous? Back in 2020 I wrote:

Ben Thompson beat me to the punch on yesterday’s edition of Dithering, observing that a rule like this about Russia during the Cold War would have blocked the entire James Bond franchise from existing, not to mention just about any lesser spy movies from the era. Or what of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove? Like the Soviet Union in the decades after WWII, China is not some obscure small player on the world stage, and they systematically do things that deserve to be portrayed “in a poor light”. To take China off the table is to take much of what’s going on geopolitically in the world today off the table.

I get it, of course. I don’t agree with it, artistically or ethically, but I get it: money talks, and China is where Apple assembles most of its products and a big market where it sells them, too. But just because it’s so transparently obvious why Apple would forbid any negative portrayals of China doesn’t make it any less outrageous. [...]

Which studios or streaming services would bankroll today’s equivalent of Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator, with Xi Jinping in Hitler’s place as the deserving target of satiric mockery? Netflix — which doesn’t offer its service in China and has no dependence on theatrical box office revenue — maybe?

What’s next, removing the Taiwanese flag emoji from the keyboard for users in Hong Kong because Winnie the Xi’s feelings are hurt that Taiwan remains staunchly independent? Oh, wait, that happened 5 years ago.

Elon Musk Told Nvidia to Ship AI Chips Reserved for Tesla to X ★

Lora Kolodny, reporting for CNBC:

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Musk said the electric vehicle company will increase the number of active H100s — Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence chip — from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. He also wrote in a post on X a few days later that Tesla would spend $10 billion this year “in combined training and inference AI.”

But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla’s procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter. [...]

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

The argument against one person being the CEO of multiple companies is generally about distraction/attention — that each CEO gig demands all of one’s available time. But here’s a case where two of Musk’s companies are in direct conflict with each other. Musk seemingly treats all of his companies as subsidiaries of his own personal fiefdom conglomerate, but they aren’t. And unlike X Corp, Tesla Motors is publicly traded.

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

The extremely obvious answer is that you should not be the CEO and controlling shareholder of two different companies that compete for the same inputs! There is not a good answer! You can’t, like, put this problem into the Good Governance Machine and have it come out clean. The problem is that you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of one company to put their interests first, and you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of the other company to put their interests first, and you cannot do both. This is why one person is not usually the CEO of two different companies that compete with each other, and, when someone is, people get mad at him all the time.

I can’t recall a situation like this when, say, Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter and Square, or, going back further, when Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple and Pixar. In those cases it was more like an athlete who played two different sports, like Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders. Fans of one of their teams might argue that they could do even better in that one sport by concentrating on it year-round, but you couldn’t argue that the Kansas City Royals were competing against the Oakland Raiders. With Musk and AI, it’s like he’s playing on several competing teams within the same league.

Open Letter From AI Researchers: ‘A Right to Warn About Advanced Artificial Intelligence’ ★

New open letter from current and former researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind:

AI companies possess substantial non-public information about the capabilities and limitations of their systems, the adequacy of their protective measures, and the risk levels of different kinds of harm. However, they currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily.

So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public. Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues. Ordinary whistleblower protections are insufficient because they focus on illegal activity, whereas many of the risks we are concerned about are not yet regulated. Some of us reasonably fear various forms of retaliation, given the history of such cases across the industry.

The 7 named signers are all former OpenAI or Google DeepMind employees. The 6 anonymous signers are all currently at OpenAI.

Monday, 3 June 2024

Tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024 ★

On sale now:

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 7 pm PT (Doors open 6 pm)
Special Guest(s): Yes
Price: $60

Video of the show will, of course, be published at the end of the week. The California Theatre is a beautiful space, and I do so enjoy meeting the readers and listeners who attend. The enthusiasm from the audience is always palpable. All year long, as I write this website and record podcasts, I know, in the back of my mind, that I have a big audience out there. But man, when I walk out on stage at the WWDC live show, I can feel it. It’s quite a thing.

I hope to see you there.

Instagram Is Testing ‘Unskippable’ Video Ads ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

The change would see the social network becoming more like the free version of YouTube, which requires users to view ads before and in the middle of watching videos.

The difference from YouTube is that YouTube offers YouTube Premium, which lets you pay a fair price for a no-ads experience. Meta is, thus far, seemingly only considering that for the EU.

I also can’t help but think, each time changes like this appear on Instagram, Enjoy the unsullied pristine Threads while we can. Because the ads are coming.

Dr Pepper Ties Pepsi as America’s No. 2 Soda ★

Jennifer Maloney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

There is a new contender in the cola wars, and it isn’t a cola. It’s Dr Pepper.

The 139-year-old soda brand is now tied with Pepsi-Cola as the No. 2 carbonated soft drink brand in America behind Coke. The regular versions of Pepsi and Dr Pepper are neck and neck in a spot that Pepsi has held nearly every year for the past four decades, according to sales-volume data from Beverage Digest.

Dr Pepper’s new ranking follows a steady climb over the past 20 years. Its ascent is a product of big marketing investments, novel flavors and a quirk in Dr Pepper’s distribution that has put it on more soda fountains than any other soft drink in the U.S. At the same time, consumption of regular Pepsi has fallen as its drinkers switch to Pepsi Zero Sugar or migrate to other drinks.

The overall Pepsi brand, including Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar, remains the No. 2 soda trademark in the U.S., though its market share has been slipping. Coke is the largest, with more than twice the market share by volume of any of its rivals.

I seldom drink sugared soda anymore, but when I do, it’s almost always either a Coke or a Dr Pepper, both of which I’ve enjoyed since childhood. (If you’re at a place that lets you pour your own fountain drinks, try mixing Coke and Dr Pepper half-and-half — delicious.) And I’ve always despised both the taste and branding of Pepsi. Dr Pepper, on the other hand, has long handled its status as the upstart in a fun way.

Via Kevin Drum, who, like me, is surprised that the no-sugar variants of these brands aren’t more popular.

Lastly, from the DF archive back in 2003: “Pop Culture”.

Sunday, 2 June 2024

Tip of the Day: Long-Press the ‘+’ Button in iOS 17 Messages to Jump to the Photo Picker ★

In iOS 17, Apple introduced an all-new design in Messages for adding attachments like photos or stickers. Everything you can attach — new images from Camera, old images from your Photos library, location-sharing, stickers, or iMessage “apps” — is accessed from an unusual-looking menu that opens when you tap the “+” button. Just one button, “+”, that opens a menu with everything. It’s just an unusual-looking menu. It’s simple, and while not flashy, it’s not unattractive — but it doesn’t look or feel like any other menu or scrolling list in iOS. Even after almost a year of using it (dating back to iOS 17 betas) I still think it looks ... unfinished? Like an early mockup that hasn’t yet been polished or refined. I’m genuinely curious if we will see more menus like this in iOS 18, or if this unique design only lasts one year and Apple comes up with something better (or at least more consistent with the rest of the system).

The number one complaint people have with this menu is that in earlier versions of iOS, it was easier to get to the Photo library picker, because there was a dedicated button for it. The new design is a much better presentation for the entire plethora of attachment types, but it adds an extra step to get to your own photos.

But, there’s a shortcut: long-press on the “+” button and you’ll jump right to the photo picker. (Also, you can long-press then drag to reorder the items in the menu itself.)

Apple Design Awards 2024 Finalists ★

A bunch of inspiring choices, as usual, including previous DF sponsors Procreate and Copilot.

Saturday, 1 June 2024

ICQ Is Shutting Down (Also: ICQ Is Still Around) ★

Michael Kan, PC Mag:

On Friday, the ICQ website posted a simple message: “ICQ will stop working from June 26.” It now recommends users migrate to the messaging platforms from VK, the Russian social media company that acquired ICQ from AOL in 2010, but under a different corporate name.

It’s an unceremonious end for a software program that helped kick off instant messaging on PCs in the 1990s. ICQ, which stands for “I Seek You,” was originally developed at an Israeli company called Mirabilis before AOL bought it in 1998 for $407 million.

Perhaps no area of computing was more disrupted by the smartphone revolution than messaging. Pre-mobile, “instant messaging” had a surprising number of popular platforms. AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was tops amongst my cohort, almost certainly because Apple’s iChat — the Mac-only predecessor to the app we now call Messages — started in 2002 exclusively as an AIM client. But Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ were all popular too. The list of protocols that the popular Mac chat app Adium supported was very long.

They all worked more or less the same way, and using any of these protocols was a lot like messaging today with iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal. But there was one big difference: with the old “instant” messengers, you were only available while your computer was online. And even then, you could set your “status” — green for “sure, hit me up, I’m free”, and red for “I’m online, but don’t bother me right now”. And if you quit your messaging client or, you know, closed your laptop, poof, you were offline and unavailable.

If you wanted to contact someone asynchronously, you sent them an email. If you wanted to chat with messaging, you both needed to be online simultaneously. Modern messaging is like a cross between email and instant messaging: you can chat, live, just like with instant messaging, but you can send a new message any time you want. There is no distinction between your being “online” or “offline”. You are just an identity with modern messaging, not a presence.

You can see why modern messaging platforms took over. Always-available protocols were destined to win out over only-available-when-you’re-logged-in protocols. And the nature of how smartphones work compared to PCs made the transition swift. But you can also see why classic instant messaging platforms evoke nostalgia: it was nice to be able to go offline.

84—24 ★

Michele Giorgi bought and restored an original 128K Macintosh, and documented the entire project in splendid fashion.

Douglas Adams on Reactions to Technology, by Age ★

Douglas Adams:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ ★

Two more on the “best decade ever” front. First a classic 2010 John Oliver segment for The Daily Show, wherein he “hopes to find the better, simpler time before America was ruined.”

Second, this 2007 Tom the Dancing Bug comic by Ruben Bolling.