Linked List: February 8, 2025

Saturday, 8 February 2025

Eddy and Tim’s Excellent Super Bowl Adventure 

Looks like more of an Eddy scene than a Tim scene, but everyone’s having fun. There’s a reason this is the 11th Super Bowl held in New Orleans.

Should be a good football game, too. The Chiefs and Eagles are both very good teams (and both very well-run franchises). There’s a strong case to be made that these are the two best teams in the NFL this season. And without question they’re two of the top four (I’d add the Bills and Ravens). If you’re only a casual fan, you might think that happens every year. A championship game, ideally, would always feature two of the very best teams. But that’s often not the way it works out. This year it did. What’s similar about both the Chiefs and Eagles is that both teams are full of surprises and tricks — they often do things no one would expect. But even more often, they do exactly what everyone expects them to do, the most predictable thing possible, and it just can’t be stopped even when the other team knows it’s coming. Anyway, I’m picking the Birds.

The Internet Archive Unveils Marble Bust of Aaron Swartz 

Zara Stone, reporting for The Standard:

“There’s a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land,” said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There’s now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin (“Do not buy,” she warned).

Aaron, I know, would have laughed at that.

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. “I’m glad he’s become a symbol, he would approve of that,” he shared, his voice slightly breaking. “I really miss him.”

I miss him too. Man. But I find it weird that there were only “few people who knew him” at the event. So many people knew him. That’s part of what made Aaron Aaron — he knew everyone interesting on the internet.

I’m not so sure, either, that he’d approve of all this, his status as a symbol to a generation who never knew him, only of him. I don’t think he’d disapprove, either, because the folks holding him up as an icon — internet freedom and preservationist zealots — are, thankfully, aligned with Aaron’s own righteous obsessions. But I think he’d be a little weirded out. He wasn’t a “I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me” sort of guy. And if he had been, we wouldn’t have loved him like we did. It’s just a terrible thing that we lost him so young.

TikTok Is Now Distributing Its Android App for Installation via Sideloading 

TikTok, on X:

We’re enhancing ways for our community to continue using TikTok by making Android Package Kits available at http://TikTok.com/download so that our U.S. Android users can download our app and create, discover, and connect on TikTok.

Tens of millions of users installing a binary straight from the Chinese Communist Party right to their phones — what could go wrong?

They also link to this support document on their website, which includes these instructions for iOS:

To access TikTok on iOS devices:

  1. Go to www.tiktok.com/download.
  2. Tap Add TikTok to Home Screen and follow the steps to create a shortcut to TikTok.com to the home screen on your device.

Which is another way of saying “Use the web app”, which is actually safe. I don’t know if they’ve always had this web app version of the app or if they scrambled to put it together during this standoff, but it’s not bad. But it’s got some very obvious layout glitches. (If you’re a regular TikTok user, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this mobile web app compares to the actual native iOS app. Let me know.)

I suspect something is going to give on this standoff. Either (a) China relents and actually sells to a U.S. company, and TikTok comes back to the App Store and Play Store; or (b) Trump’s extralegal extension expires with no sale and Oracle and Akamai are forced to pull the plug on ByteDance’s cloud services in the US. Another extension is another possibility, of course, but I think Republican China hawks like Tom Cotton only have one grace period in them. We’ll see.

If I’m wrong and TikTok remains in this half-zombie state in the US — unavailable in the App Store or Play Store, but operational if you have the app installed on your phone — it’ll be interesting if TikTok is the app that makes the mass market actually care about the lack of sideloading on iOS. It’ll be interesting too if sideloading on Android goes mainstream because of this. This could be a fascinating experiment. Proponents of Apple permitting Mac-style software distribution on iOS often argue that normal people, who aren’t technically adept or savvy — simply won’t do it, because they don’t care enough to jump through the hoops and click through the warnings about the risks of sideloading. But maybe TikTok is so popular it could break through. Not to mention the fact that ByteDance can use TikTok itself to algorithmically boost pro-sideloading videos, and perhaps even push a trend that if you care about TikTok, you should switch to Android.

Jason Snell Went There, Calls for iOS to Follow the Mac Model for Software Distribution 

Jason Snell, in a column for Macworld back in November (same column at Six Colors, for members):

This is an important moment. Apple has built two separate models for running software on our devices. In one, there’s a gradient of trustworthiness that strongly encourages users to stick to the safe, well-lit paths–but allows competitors to go their own way and users to make different decisions than Apple would prefer they make. And, yes, at the extremes, users can behave in ways that might open them up to danger, but only after many warnings. It’s a very good system. Apple built it that way because it cares about the Mac, the Mac ecosystem, and Mac users.

Of course, the other model is the one we’re familiar with from iOS: There’s only one layer and Apple entirely controls it. Even though we’re spending thousands of dollars to own devices that can run software developed by clever people from all over the world, Apple believes that only it should be able to determine what kinds of apps are allowed, that it should always be cut in on the revenue of every financial transaction inside those apps, and that if it doesn’t like anything about a developer’s app, it can demand it be changed or the app made to disappear into oblivion.

That both of these approaches come from the same company is… kind of staggering, to be honest. [...] I know which Apple-built approach should be the model for the future of software on computing devices. The good news is that Apple has already built it. The era of top-down control of our devices needs to end. The Mac is the model.

I’ve been itching to link to this since he wrote it, but I was torn between the urge to write something long, or just link to it and keep my commentary short. Short it is, for now. I don’t think Snell is wrong. I know many — perhaps most? — of you reading this agree with him. I’m quite certain that if iOS shifted to Mac-style rules for software distribution, I personally would enjoy it with zero downsides — I’d gain access to software previously unavailable from the App Store (we could make Kotoba a simple download, for example), new software that never existed in the first place due to App Store rules would spring into existence, and I’m quite confident I’d personally never once be tricked or fooled into installing even a single piece of software I’d later come to regret. So if Apple were ever to follow Snell’s advice — whether by a change of mind in Cupertino, or begrudgingly at the figurative gunpoint of government regulation — I would personally come out happier for it. So too, probably would you.

But I don’t think Apple should do this, because I think there are tens of millions — maybe hundreds of millions — of iPhone users who would wind up installing apps they’d come to regret having installed. An updated, longer take from me on this will have to wait, but for now, I direct your attention to these previous takes on at least some aspects of this:

‘Torrenting From a Corporate Laptop Doesn’t Feel Right’ 

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica on new details from an authors group lawsuit alleging Meta trained its AI models on a trove of pirated books:

Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.”

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as being in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again because the new facts allegedly “contradict prior deposition testimony.” Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the “decision to use LibGen occurred” after “a prior escalation to MZ,” authors alleged.

Regardless of how you feel about AI training on public data, you have to be a zealot not to acknowledge that a lot of stuff falls into a gray zone. Torrenting 81 terabytes of pirated books is not in the gray zone. It’s hilarious to imagine Zuckerberg giving the OK to pirate all these books, just not from the office.