Linked List: October 8, 2025

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Apple Faces French Investigation Over Opt-In Siri Voice Recordings 

Benoit Berthelot and Gaspard Sebag, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. faces an investigation in France over the use of voice recordings made with its assistant Siri. The probe has been referred to the Office for Combating Cybercrime, the Paris prosecutor’s office said in a statement on Monday. An Apple spokesperson referred to a blog post the company published in January about its use of voice recordings, and declined to comment further.

Politico earlier reported the investigation.

The investigation concerns Apple’s collection of user recordings through Siri, the digital assistant available on most of its devices. Apple can record and retain audio interactions through Siri to help improve its services, a feature the company says is opt-in. Some of that data can be retained for up to two years and reviewed by “graders”, or subcontractors, according to Apple.

Sending recorded Siri voice interactions to Apple is opt-in, and the opt-in screen is very clear and cogent. It’s not just something Apple claims.

Amazing stuff continues to happen in the EU.

Katie Notopoulos on the Difference Between Sora and Meta Vibes 

Katie Notopoulos, on Threads:

Me looking at Vibes feed: this is screensaver. So boring. Why would anyone want it?

Me looking at videos I made of my own face in Sora 2: heheh I love this it’s funny it’s ME.

My feelings exactly.

I even like staring at screensavers sometimes. But the screensavers I like watching are Apple’s aerial (and occasionally, underwater) screensavers on Apple TV. They’re slow, peaceful, and real. Vibes is chaotic, fast, and phony.

‘Sora’s Slop Hits Different’ 

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:

I think that’s the real revelation here. It’s less about consumption and more about creation. I previously wrote about how I was an early investor in Vine in part because it felt like it could be analogous to Instagram. Thanks in large part to filters, that app made it easy for anyone to think they were good enough to be a photographer. It didn’t matter if they were or not, they thought they were — I was one of them — so everyone posted their photos. Vine felt like it could have been that for video thanks to its clever tap-to-record mechanism. But actually, it became a network for a lot of really talented amateurs to figure out a new format for funny videos on the internet. When Twitter acquired the company and dropped the ball, TikTok took that idea and scaled it (thanks to ByteDance paying um, Meta billions of dollars for distribution, and their own very smart algorithms).

In a way, Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator.

I don’t want to predict if Sora is a fad or has staying power, but so far I enjoy it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed a new social network in years. It’s just fun to dash off a stupid video with no more work than a quick text prompt, and the friends I’m following are making some damn funny clips every day.

Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics 

The New York Times:

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.

“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables. It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.

Can you believe these woke dopes gave this award to three people, and not one of them is Donald Trump?