Linked List: January 22, 2025

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

Southern California Wildfire Relief: Consider Donating to the Red Cross Through Apple 

Apple:

Click the amount you wish to contribute, then click Donate and Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires.

Apple has prominent links to its Red Cross donation form on the web and in the App Store. They’ve been doing this after catastrophes and disasters around the world for a long time. On the surface, it’s great because it’s so easy. Apple already has your saved credentials so it takes just a few taps or clicks to donate. You can measure the time to donate in seconds, not minutes.

But an under-appreciated aspect of Apple acting as a front-end to the Red Cross is that your donation remains completely private. There’s quite a lot of small print on the donation screen, which starts:

Because Apple is not sharing your personal information with the American Red Cross, the American Red Cross is unable to further acknowledge your donation. You will receive an email receipt from Apple, which will serve as the only record of your donation. The donation will also appear on your credit card statement as a transaction with Apple. You do not purchase any goods or receive any services from Apple by making a donation. Any donation collected by Apple is collected in the name, and on behalf, of the American Red Cross. This donation may not qualify for any tax deduction or other tax benefits. By donating through Apple, you acknowledge that any tax consequences to you in making the donation (including, but not limited to, ensuring you have sufficient documentation to claim any applicable tax deduction) shall be your responsibility. Apple Account credit cannot be used to make a donation. Apple will transfer 100% of your contribution to the American Red Cross in support of people impacted by the 2025 Southern California wildfires (including Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties).

This sounds like a bunch of ignorable legalese but what it really means is quite interesting. You’re not giving to the Red Cross through this. You’re giving money to Apple, and Apple will then transfer 100 percent of it to the Red Cross. I’m almost certain, for example, that Apple is covering the cost of the card transaction fees.

By donating this way, you will never get junk mail, email, or text messages from the Red Cross, or from any “partner” of the Red Cross, soliciting additional donations, because the Red Cross will never get your name, address, or number. All they get is your money.

Back in August I wrote about how my political solicitations via SMS had gotten so out of control, so downright annoying, that my wife and I had scaled back our donations to political campaigns, because it was obvious that previous campaigns we had donated to had shared or sold our information. We’d been put on a Suckers List.

The same thing, sadly, happens with charities. People generally don’t want to admit to selfishness, but I will. When I give money to a charitable cause, I always look for the checkboxes to opt out of being contacted by them in the future. When it happens anyway, I get annoyed, and I become reluctant to give to that charity again. And because it has happened repeatedly, it’s made me at least somewhat more reluctant to give to any charitable cause in the first place. I know I’m not alone in feeling that way.

When you donate to the Red Cross via Apple, that concern is off the table. Apple won’t emphasize that aspect of this, because they don’t want to throw the Red Cross under the proverbial bus, but I will. An underrated aspect of privacy is the desire simply not to be annoyed.

The Ship That Leaks From the Top Is Back 

From a multi-byline profile of Stephen Miller in The New York Times last week:

Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.

Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.

Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.

This account of the meeting clearly leaked from Trump’s side, not Meta’s side. The tone of it is that Miller told Zuckerberg to jump, and that Zuck obsequiously and gladly responded “How high?”

Zuckerberg scrambled for cover, posting a “Sheryl did amazing work at Meta and will forever be a legend in the industry [...]” tweet to Threads, followed by a coordinated “Thank you, @zuck. I will always be grateful for the many years we spent building a great business together [...]” reply from Sandberg. (Sandberg, who left Meta in 2022, only posted once to Threads in all of 2024. There’s a good chance this will be her only post in 2025.)

Zuckerberg, politically, seems in way over his head. The first Trump administration was infamous for its leaks. They barely hid it. The whole Trump brand is about brazenness. For decades, Trump was known to call reporters in New York under the guise of “John Miller” or “John Barron”, who were ostensibly public relations spokesmen representing Trump. But it was just him — and he didn’t even disguise his voice. He just did it.

So of course Stephen Miller (or Miller’s equivalent of John Barron) leaked the confidential nature of his discussion with Zuckerberg to The New York Times, because it made Miller look dominating and Zuckerberg look dominated. Even though it’s painfully obvious to anyone who sees this story that anything confidential they tell Stephen Miller might get leaked if it makes Miller look good. It’s like a perversion of your Miranda rights, a Miranda wrongs if you will: Anything you say to anyone in the Trump administration can and will be used against you in leaks to the media.

You don’t see stories like this about Cook or Nadella or Bezos, because I think those guys have the good sense to keep their mouths shut and just nod their heads. (Not Musk, though. When Trump and Musk eventually divorce in a spectacular flame-out, we’ll be deluged with stories about what Musk said in supposed confidence.)

Alan Rozenshtein, writing for Lawfare:

While Apple and Google maintained their compliance, Oracle and Akamai made the remarkable decision to resume services, despite facing potentially catastrophic liability rates. Shortly after his inauguration on Jan. 20, Trump followed through by issuing an executive order that suspended PAFACAA enforcement for 75 days and attempted to provide retroactive protection for any violations before and during the nonenforcement period.

TikTok’s tech partners face a key executive power question: Can they rely on Trump’s promises not to enforce PAFACAA? If companies continue providing services to TikTok, can Trump later change his mind and pursue enforcement actions against them for all accumulated violations? Could a future administration enforce these violations regardless of Trump’s current promises? The stakes are enormous — nearly a trillion dollars in potential liability. Unfortunately for the companies, established legal doctrine suggests that they are making a remarkably risky bet on both the scope and durability of executive non-enforcement promises.

Here we are on Wednesday and ByteDance apps remain out of both Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

Next Week’s iOS 18.3 and MacOS 15.3 Updates Will Enable Apple Intelligence During Onboarding 

From Apple’s developer release notes for iOS 18.3, now at release candidate (RC) status:

For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.

Same for MacOS 15.3 Sequoia, which is also at RC status and expected next week.

I have mixed feelings about this decision. It’s pretty obvious that Apple Intelligence has a slew of shortcomings. It’s the nature of the beast, though, that it’s always going to have some shortcomings. Human intelligence, which to date remains the gold standard for intelligence in general, has some pretty glaring shortcomings, so it’s unsurprising that all artificial intelligence systems still do too. (Perhaps that’s a good metric for defining the next inflection point, now that the Turing Test has been passed: When humans need to ask AI systems to explain their own shortcomings, because we’re no longer smart enough to detect them ourselves.)

So the bar shouldn’t be “has obvious shortcomings”. It’s whether Apple Intelligence is good enough. Compared to other systems, like ChatGPT, no, it’s not good enough. But Apple has been enabling Siri by default since 2011. And Siri, today, is arguably worse than it’s ever been when compared to the state of the art. A friend just sent me this screenshot after asking Siri “Who won Super Bowl 13?” and getting this answer: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. In addition to wrongly casing the Roman numerals, LII is 52, not 13. The only way Siri could have been more wrong would be if the Eagles hadn’t even won Super Bowl 52. I just tried the same question — “Who won Super Bowl 13?” — on both my iPhone running iOS 18.3 RC1 and my Mac running MacOS 15.1.1, and Siri gave me the same wrong answer, on both devices, both when the question was spoken aloud and when it was typed: “Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl Lii • Winner”. Siri, today, is an unfunny joke.

But so I think it’s reasonable to ask whether Apple Intelligence is as good as Siri. I’d say yes, that’s about how good Apple Intelligence is. In fact, I’d say several of the Apple Intelligence features — Clean Up in Photos, and notification summaries — are better than Siri. So if Siri has been on by default for over a decade, sure, Apple should go ahead and turn Apple Intelligence on by default too.

I think there could be significant benefit to turning it on by default, sort of in the spirit of dogfooding. Enabling Apple Intelligence features by default will increase the pressure on Apple to keep improving it at a fast clip. It’s also the case that none of Apple Intelligence’s features, with the possible exception of notification summaries, are in the user’s face at all. You have to invoke them to use them. If you don’t want them — or don’t even know about them — you won’t notice anything different once they’re enabled by default. Apple may or may not be over-indexing on Apple Intelligence, but, thankfully, they’re not shoving it in users’ faces.

But, as I wrote two weeks ago, enabling it by default for all users really puts the lie to their claim that all of Apple Intelligence is “beta”. If it’s not just merely shipping to all users, but now enabled by default, that’s not beta. That’s just buggy.