Pixel Envy

In long:

Ten years ago, the USB Implementers Forum finalized the specification for USB-C 1.0, and the world rejoiced, for it would free us from the burden of remembering which was the correct orientation of the plug relative to the socket. And lo, it was good.

And then we all actually got around to using USB-C devices and realized this whole thing is a little bit messy. While there was now a universal connector, the capabilities of the cable can range from those which support only power with maybe a trickle of data, all the way up to others which carry data at USB4 speeds. But that is not all. It might also support various Thunderbolt standards — 3, 4, and now 5 — and DisplayPort. That is neat. Again, this is all done using the same connector size and shape, and with cables that look practically interchangeable.

Which brings us to Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic — a requisite destination for intellectualized lukewarm takes — about his cable woes:

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when the first form of USB was announced and then launched. The problem this was meant to solve was the same one as today’s: “A rat’s nest of cords, cables and wires,” as The New York Times described the situation in 1998. Individual gadgets demanded specific plugs: serial, parallel, PS/2, SCSI, ADB, and others. USB longed to standardize and simplify matters — and it did, for a time.

But then it evolved: USB 1.1, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, USB4, and then, irrationally, USB4 2.0. Some of these cords and their corresponding ports looked identical, but had different capabilities for transferring data and powering devices. I can only gesture to the depth of absurdity that was soon attained without boring you to tears or lapsing into my own despair. […]

Reader — and I mean this with respect — I am only too willing to bore you to tears with another article about USB-C. Bogost is right, though. The original USB standard unified the many different ports one was expected to use for peripherals. It basically succeeded for at least two of them: the keyboard and mouse. Both require minimal data, so they work fine regardless of whether the port supports USB 1.1 or USB 3.1. Such standardization also came with loads more benefits, too, like reducing setup and configuration once necessary for even basic peripherals.

Where things got complicated is when data transfer speeds actually matter. USB 1.1 — the first version most people actually used — topped out at 12 Mbits per second; USB 2.0 could do 480 Mbits per second. Even so, the ports and cables looked identical. If you plugged an external hard drive into your computer using the wrong cable, you would notice because it would crawl.

This begat more specs allowing for higher speeds, requiring new cables and — sometimes — new connectors. And it was kind of a mess. So the USB-IF got together and created USB-C, which at least solves some of these problems. It is a more elegant connector and, so far, it has been flexible enough to support a wide range of uses.

That is kind of the problem with it, though: the connector can do everything, but there is no easy way to see what capabilities are supported by either the port or the cable. Put another way, if you connect a Thunderbolt 5 hard drive using the same cable as you use to charge new Magic Mouse and Keyboard, you will notice, just as you did twenty years ago.

Bogost, after describing his array of gadgets connected by USB-A, USB-C, and micro-HDMI:

This chaos was supposed to end, with USB-C as our savior. The European Union even passed a law to make that port the charging standard by the end of this year. […]

Hope persists that someday, eventually, this hell can be escaped — and that, given sufficient standardization, regulatory intervention, and consumer demand, a winner will emerge in the battle of the plugs. But the dream of having a universal cable is always and forever doomed, because cables, like humankind itself, are subject to the curse of time, the most brutal standard of them all. At any given moment, people use devices they bought last week alongside those they’ve owned for years; they use the old plugs in rental cars or airport-gate-lounge seats; they buy new gadgets with even better capabilities that demand new and different (if similar-looking) cables. […]

If the ultimate goal is a single cable and connector that can do everything from charge your bike light to connect a RAID array — do we still have RAID arrays? — I think that is foolish.

But I do not think that is the expectation. For one thing, note Bogost’s correctly chosen phrasing of what the E.U.’s standard entails. All devices have unified around a single charging standard, which does not demand any specialized cable. I use a Thunderbolt cable to sync my iPhone and charge my third-party keyboard, because I cannot be tamed.¹ The same is true of my laptop and also my wife’s, the headphones I am wearing right now, a Bluetooth speaker we have kicking around, our Nintendo Switch, and my bicycle tire pump. Having one cable for all this stuff rules.

If you need higher speeds, though, I would bet you know that. If the difference between Thunderbolt 4 and Thunderbolt 5 matters to you, you are a different person than most. And, I would wager, you are probably happy that you can connect a fancy Thunderbolt drive to any old USB-C port and still read its contents, even if it is not as fast. That kind of compatibility is great.

Lookalike connectors are nothing new, however. P.C. users probably remember the days of PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which had the same plugs but were not interchangeable. 3.5mm circular ports were used for audio out, audio in, microphone — separate from audio in, for some reason — and individual speakers. This was such a mess that Microsoft and Intel decided PC ports needed colour-coding (PDF). Even proprietary connectors have this problem, as Apple demonstrated with some Lightning accessories.

We are doomed to repeat this so long as the same connectors and cables describe a wide range of capabilities. But solving that should never be the expectation. We should be glad to unify around standards for at least basic functions like charging and usable data transfer. USB-C faced an uphill battle because we probably had — and still have — devices which use other connectors. While my tire pump uses USB-C, my bike light charges using some flavour of mini-USB port. I do not know which. I have one cable that works and I dare not lose it.

Every newer standard is going to face an increasingly steep hill. USB-C now has a supranational government body mandating its use for wired charging in many devices which, for all its benefits, is also a hurdle if and when someone wants to build some device in which it would be difficult to accommodate a USB-C port. That I am struggling to think of a concrete example is perhaps an indicator of the specificity of such a product and, also, that I am not in the position of dreaming up such products.

But even without that regulatory oversight, any new standard will have to supplant a growing array of USB-C devices. We may not get another attempt at this kind of universality for a long time yet. It is a good thing USB-C is quite an elegant connector, and such a seemingly flexible set of standards.

I still use a Lightning Magic Trackpad which means I used to charge it and sync my iPhone with the same cable, albeit more slowly. Apparently, the new USB-C Magic Trackpad is incompatible with my 2017 iMac, though I am not entirely sure why. Bluetooth, maybe? Standards! ↥︎

November 3, 2024 ⌥

Humane Is Trying to License Its Operating System, a Move It Swears Was the Strategy All Along ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going:

Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind of operating system powered the AI Pin. It was clear that AI Pin wasn’t merely a hardware wrapper for ChatGPT; it was software developed for the oncoming AI future.

Sitting across from me, Chaudhri is sharing details about lessons learned and his company’s core product, CosmOS, the AI operating system. The company now plans to license the software to those interested in AI-powered devices.

There is a diagram in this article illustrating the difference between the architecture of a “traditional O.S.” and that of this “A.I. operating system”, and I think I understand it — but only kind of. The way I interpret Malik’s explanation is that it works almost like a mix of plugins and a sort of universal data layer.

The way this was demonstrated to Malik was as though it was a car’s operating system. Malik says it was “much more intelligent than, say, an Alexa device”, which might very well be true. But the skills which were demonstrated are nominally possible with assistants that already exist in smartphone operating systems, albeit in a way that sounds far less sophisticated than Humane is able to deliver. If you have a relatively recent car, you can plug in your phone and get very close to that capability today.

I am reminded of Jason Snell’s article from the week of the A.I. Pin’s launch, in which he pointed out “how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies”. The hard part for Humane — whether pinned to your shirt or installed in your car’s dashboard — is that it wants you to maintain an entirely new digital space in a world of far bigger companies that want to keep you in their insular environments.

Malik:

Licensing an operating system can be a lucrative business. Microsoft’s Windows windfall is legendary. However, there are other less obvious examples. In 1998, I wrote about a company called Integrated Systems that made an OS for devices ranging from dishwashers to microwaves. In 2000, it merged with Wind River Systems, and their OS powered all these devices that are computers but don’t look like computers — washing machines, for example. Wind River is now owned by Intel.

Wind River was sold by Intel in 2018 to TPG, a private equity firm, nine years after buying it for $884 million. The financial terms of TPG’s purchase were not disclosed, which does not suggest Intel made a killing and kind of implies it lost money. Just four years and predictable layoffs later, it sold the company for $4.3 billion. This is not really a correction to Malik’s point; more of an addition.

November 1, 2024 ⌥

Apple Intelligence Is Coming to the E.U. In April ⇥ apple.com

Apple on Monday in the Irish press release for this week’s operating system updates:

Mac users in the EU can access Apple Intelligence in U.S. English with macOS Sequoia 15.1. This April, Apple Intelligence features will start to roll out to iPhone and iPad users in the EU. This will include many of the core features of Apple Intelligence, including Writing Tools, Genmoji, a redesigned Siri with richer language understanding, ChatGPT integration, and more.

This timeline coincides with additional language availability. In December, Apple will roll out support for some non-U.S. versions of English; in April, it will add other languages like French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. So there is functionally no delay in the availability of Apple Intelligence for many E.U. users — at least, not if they would like to use these features in their first language.

I would not go so far as to argue this has all been a charade designed to turn public sentiment against E.U. regulators. By cautioning users — and shareholders — back in June, Apple indicated this rollout would not entirely be on its own schedule, just as it did in September when it needed regulatory approval for sleep apnea notifications and the AirPods hearing aid feature. It is not really a problem. Besides, Apple has not meaningfully location-gated Apple Intelligence in the same way as it has, say, E.U.-specific features.

Romain Dillet, TechCrunch:

From this list, it turns out all Apple Intelligence features are coming to the EU, except … notification summaries? We’ve reached out to Apple for more details about what’s not coming to the EU and an Apple spokesperson sent us the following statement: […]

The statement is not particularly illuminating, only repeating the bullet point from the press release and saying the company is still working through DMA compliance questions. It is not even clear that notification summaries are not part of the feature set rolling out in April.

All we know right now is that Apple’s E.U. rollout of Apple Intelligence coincides with the availability of a bunch of European languages. The April language pack notably also adds support for two other English languages — Indian and Singaporean — plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. No word on availability in China, but Tim Cook is working on it.

November 1, 2024 ⌥

Apple Ends a Week of Announcements by Acquiring Pixelmator ⇥ pixelmator.com

Pixelmator:

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Congratulations to the Pixelmator team.

I have to say this is a little unsurprising. Pixelmator’s whole vibe is very Apple, but not; I cited the company’s website as an example of one aping Apple’s own.

I am also a touch worried. The first thing I thought of was Apple’s purchase of Workflow, now Shortcuts. In the past seven years, the capability of Shortcuts has been expanded tremendously, but it has also been routinely broken in iOS updates. There are frequent errors with syncing, actions stop working without warning, and compatibility does not always feel like a priority in new first-party software releases.

So, good for Pixelmator for attracting Apple’s attention and delivering quality software for years — software which can go toe-to-toe with offerings from companies far larger and richer. I hope this acquisition is great news for users, too, but I think it is fair to be apprehensive.

October 31, 2024 ⌥

When Does Instagram Decide a Nipple Becomes Female? ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

For the past two years an algorithmic artist who goes by Ada Ada Ada has been testing the boundaries of human and automated moderation systems on various social media platforms by documenting her own transition.

Every week she uploads a shirtless self portrait to Instagram alongside another image which shows whether a number of AI-powered tools from big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft that attempt to automatically classify the gender of a person see her as male or female. Each image also includes a sequential number, year, and the number of weeks since Ada Ada Ada started hormone therapy.

You want to see great art made with the help of artificial intelligence? Here it is — though probably not in the way one might have expected.

In the first post to be removed by Instagram, Ada Ada Ada calls it a “victory”, and it truly sounds validating. Instagram has made her point and, though she is still able to post photos, you can flip through her pinned story archives “censorship” and “censorship 2” to see how Meta’s systems interpret other posts.

October 31, 2024 ⌥

StopTheMadness Pro Version 11 ⇥ underpassapp.com

Jeff Johnson:

First, StopTheMadness Pro 11.0 adds the ability to copy a text fragment link from selected text in Safari, using a contextual menu item on macOS or Show Menu on Tap on iOS. The previous two links are themselves examples of text fragments; the first link, when clicked, scrolls to and highlights the text “Contextual Menu Items (macOS Safari)” on the linked page.

[…]

I was inspired to add this feature by Nick Heer’s blog post about text fragments.

I promise to use this overwhelming power for good.

These and other features await in a great update to one of my very favourite extensions. Unfortunately, the VisionOS version is stuck in App Review hell. But if you use any of Apple’s other platforms, good things await.

October 30, 2024 ⌥

All Macs Except the Walmart M1 MacBook Air Now Have a Minimum of 16 GB of RAM ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

It’s officially the end of an era. Apple on Wednesday held the last day of its super week of Mac announcements, this time with the launch of a new generation MacBook Pro with an M4 chip. But the company also did something else: it upgraded all Macs with 16GB of RAM as standard, putting an end to 8GB Macs.

A legitimate finally, and good news. 8GB of RAM has been standard on MacBook Air models since 2017, and on retina MacBook Pro models and iMacs since 2012.

For completeness, you can still buy a new Mac with 8GB of RAM: the Walmart-exclusive M1 MacBook Air which, nevertheless, still supports Apple Intelligence. Not that I would have expected Apple’s volume sales discount Mac to get this bump but, still, it is not yet the end of an era.

October 29, 2024 ⌥

Calgary Public Library Says It Is Slowly Resuming Services After Attempted Ransomware Attack ⇥ calgarylibrary.ca

A press release from Calgary Public Library:

The Library’s Technology Team and existing cybersecurity partners engaged a Microsoft Incident Response team to support containment procedures and complete a thorough investigation. The findings of the investigation confirm that while servers were compromised, no business, employee or membership data was affected. The incident was identified as an attempted ransomware attack, which the Library’s monitoring systems successfully blocked. The Library was not in communication with any threat agent during this period and has provided information to appropriate authorities to support further investigation.

This comes just over two weeks after the library announced it was targeted. It is not offering many further details yet, such as an estimate for its staged return to normal service, but it sounds like it will be on a faster track than the attacks which affected libraries in London, Seattle, and Toronto. If serious damage has been avoided, I am thankful given those comparable situations.

October 29, 2024 ⌥

World Leaders’ Security Personnel Are on Strava ⇥ apnews.com

Sébastien Bourdon, Antoine Schirer, and Sinead McCausland, of Le Monde, are in the middle of a three-part investigation into how Strava compromises the travel activities of world leaders. It is paywalled, but two videos, in English, have been published on YouTube.

Sylvie Corbet, with an AP summary which, despite citing Le Monde, does not link back to the publication:

Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.

In statements from the GSPR and U.S. Secret Service, officials disputed the likelihood this is meaningfully harmful. World leaders’ trips are usually public information and, while there is minor risk in the advance disclosure of where the leader is staying, officials say there are enough layers of security. That seems right to me. What Le Monde identified is a theoretical concern, but it has not demonstrated an actual problem.

To illustrate: one example the journalists showed was a meeting between hopefully-just-one-time president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un at a hotel in Singapore. The trip was public knowledge and announced a week before it occurred. Five days prior, however, a Secret Service agent was preparing the hotel for Trump’s arrival. Anyone monitoring this Secret Service agent’s activity might at most infer Trump would be travelling to Singapore, or perhaps that this agent is on holiday. Now, if Le Monde had found similar Strava activity from Singaporean police and North Korea’s Supreme Guard Command, that would be more notable. Small amounts of quasi-private information are rarely valuable, but the combination of several sources can be.

If this feels familiar, it is because Nathan Ruser and other researchers found secret military bases in 2018 using data from Strava. All these cases feel like a legacy of decisions made at a time when public social activity was seen as inherently good.

Sorry Siri

October 28, 2024 ⌥

If software is judged by the difference between what it is actually capable of compared to what it promises, Siri is unquestionably the worst built-in iOS application. I cannot think of any other application which comes preloaded with a new iPhone that so greatly underdelivers, and has for so long.

Siri is thirteen years old, and we all know the story: beneath the more natural language querying is a fairly standard command-and-control system. In those years, Apple has updated the scope of its knowledge and responses, but because the user interface is not primarily a visual one, its outer boundaries are fuzzy. It has limits, but a user cannot know what they are until they try something and it fails. Complaining about Siri is both trite and evergreen. Yes, Siri has sucked forever, but maybe this time will be different.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced Siri would get a whole new set of powers thanks to Apple Intelligence. Users could, Apple said, speak with more natural phrasing. It also said Siri would understand the user’s “personal context” — their unique set of apps, contacts, and communications. All of that sounds great, but I have been down this road before. Apple has often promised improvements to Siri that have not turned it into the compelling voice-activated digital assistant it is marketed to be.

I was not optimistic — and I am glad — because Siri in iOS 18.1 is still pretty poor, with a couple of exceptions: its new visual presentation is fantastic, and type-to-Siri is nice. It is unclear exactly how Siri is enhanced with Apple Intelligence — more on this later — but this version is exactly as frustrating as those before it, in all the same ways.

As a reminder, Apple says users can ask Siri…

…to text a contact by using only their first name.
…for directions to locations using the place name.
…to play music by artist, album, or song.
…to start and stop timers.
…to convert from one set of units to another.
…to translate from one language to another.
…about Apple’s product features and documentation, new in iOS 18.1.
…all kinds of other stuff.

It continues to do none of these things reliably or predictably. Even Craig Federighi, when he was asked by Joanna Stern, spoke of his pretty limited usage:

I’m opening my garage, I’m closing my garage, I’m turning on my lights.

All kinds of things, I’m sending messages, I’m setting timers.

I do not want to put too much weight on this single response, but these are weak examples. This is what he could think of off the top of his head? That is all? I get it; I do not use it for much, either. And, as Om Malik points out, even the global metrics Federighi cites in the same answer do not paint a picture of success.

So, a refresh, and I will start with something positive: its new visual interface. Instead of a floating orb, the entire display warps and colour-shifts before being surrounded by a glowing border, as though enveloped in a dense magical vapour. Depending on how you activate Siri, the glow will originate from a different spot: from the power button, if you press and hold it; or from the bottom of the display, if you say “Siri” or “Hey, Siri”.

You can also now invoke text-based Siri — perfect for times when you do not want to speak aloud — by double-tapping the home bar. There has long been an option to type to Siri, but it has not been surfaced this easily, and I like it.

That is kind of where the good news stops, at least in my testing. I have rarely had a problem with Siri’s ability to understand what I am saying — I have a flat, Canadian accent, and I can usually speak without pauses or repeating words. There are writers who are more capable of testing for improvements for people with disabilities.

No, the things which Siri has flubbed have always been, for me, in its actions. Some of those should be new in iOS 18.1, or at least newly refined, but it is hard to know which. While Siri looks entirely different in this release, it is unclear what new capabilities it possesses. The full release notes say it can understand spoken queries better, and it has product documentation, but it seems anything else will be coming in future updates. I know a feature Apple calls “onscreen awareness”, which can interpret what is displayed, is one of those. I also know some personal context features will be released later — Apple says a user “could ask, ‘When is Mom’s flight landing?’ and Siri will find the flight details” no matter how they were sent. This is all coming later and, presumably, some of it requires third-party developer buy-in.

But who reads and remembers the release notes? What we all see is a brand-new Siri, and what we hear about is Apple Intelligence. Surely there must be some improvements beyond being able to ask the Apple assistant about the company’s own products, right? Well, if there are, I struggled to find them. Here are the actual interactions I have had in beta versions of iOS 18.1 for each thing in the list above:

I asked Siri to text Ellis — not their real name — a contact I text regularly. It began a message to a different Ellis I have in my contacts, to whom I have not spoken in over ten years.

Similarly, I asked it to text someone I have messaged on an ongoing basis for fifteen years. Their thread is pinned to the top of Messages. Before it would let me text them, it asked if I wanted it to send it to their phone number or their email address.
I was driving and I asked for directions to Walmart. Its first suggestion was farther away and opposite the direction I was already travelling.
I asked Siri to “play the new album from Better Lovers”, an artist I have in my library and an album that I recently listened to in Apple Music. No matter my enunciation, it responded by playing an album from the Backseat Lovers, a band I have never listened to.

I asked Siri to play an album which contains a song of the same name. This is understandably ambiguous if I do not explicitly state “play the album” or “play the song“. However, instead of asking for clarification when there is a collision like this, it just rolls the dice. Sometimes it plays the album, sometimes the song. But I am an album listener more often than I am a song listener, and my interactions with Siri and Apple Music should reflect that.
Siri starts timers without issue. It is one of few things which behaves reliably. But when I asked it to “stop the timer”, it asked me to clarify “which one?” between one active timer and two already-stopped timers. It should just stop the sole active timer; why would I ask it to stop a stopped timer?
I asked Siri “how much does a quarter cup of butter weigh?” and it converts that to litres or — because my device is set to U.S. localization for the purposes of testing Apple Intelligence — gallons. Those are volumetric measurements, not weight-based. If I ask Siri “what is the weight of a quarter cup of butter?”, it searches the web. I have to explicitly say “convert one quarter cup of butter to grams”.
I asked Siri “what is puente in English?” and it informed me I needed to use the Translate app. Apparently, you can only translate from Siri’s language — English, in this case — to another language when using Siri. Translating from a different language cannot be done with Siri alone.
I rarely see the Priority Messages feature in Mail, so I asked Siri about it. I tried different ways to phrase my question, like “what is the Priority Messages feature in Mail?”, but it would not return any documentation about this feature.

Maybe I am using Siri wrong, or expecting too much. Perhaps all of this is a beta problem. But, aside from the last bullet, these are the kinds of things Apple has said Siri can do for over a decade, and it does not do so predictably or reliably. I have had similar or identical problems with Siri in non-beta versions of iOS. Today, while using the released version of iOS 18.1, I asked it if a nearby deli was open. It gave me the hours for a deli in Spokane — hundreds of kilometres away, and in a different country.

This all feels like it may be, perhaps, a side effect of treating an iPhone as an entire widget with a governed set of software add-ons. The quality of the voice assistant is just one of a number of factors to consider when buying a smartphone, and the predictably poor Siri is probably not going to be a deciding factor for many.

But the whole widget has its advantages — you can find plenty of people discussing those, and Apple’s many marketing pieces will dutifully recite them. Since its debut in 2011, Apple has rarely put Siri front-and-centre in its iPhone advertising campaigns, but it is doing just that with the iPhone 16. It is showcasing features which rely on whole-device control — features that, admittedly, will not be shipping for many months. But the message is there: Siri has a deep understanding of your world and can present just the right information for you. Yet, as I continue to find out, it does not do that for me. It does not know who I text in the first-party Messages app or what music I listen to in Apple Music.

Would Siri be such a festering scab if it had competitors within iOS? Thanks to an extremely permissive legal environment around the world in which businesses scoop up vast amounts of behavioural data to make it slightly easier to market laundry detergent and dropshipped widgets, there is a risk to granting this kind of access to some third-party product. But if there were policies to make that less worrisome, and if Apple permitted it, there would be more intense pressure to improve Siri — and, for that matter, all voice assistants tied to specific devices.

The rollout of Apple Intelligence is uncharacteristically piecemeal and messy. Apple did not promise a big Siri overhaul in this version of iOS 18.1. But by giving it a new design, Apple communicates something is different. It is not — at least, not yet. Maybe it will be one day. Nothing about Siri’s state over the past decade-plus gives me hope that it will, however. I have barely noticed improvements in the things Apple says it should do better in iOS 18.1, like preserving context and changing my mind mid-dictation.

Siri remains software I distrust. Like Federighi, I would struggle to list my usage beyond a handful of simple commands — timers, reminders, and the occasional message. Anything else, and it remains easier and more reliable to wash my hands if I am kneading pizza dough, or park the car if I am driving, and do things myself.

October 27, 2024 ⌥

Setting Up Mastodon Author Tags ⇥ rknight.me

Robb Knight:

Mastodon 4.3 released today with a bunch of features but the one most people, including me, are excited about is author tags – this isn’t the name of them but they also don’t seem to have a proper name as far as I can tell. Anyway, you need to do two things to get the “More from X” section you can see in the screenshot above. The first is to add the fediverse:creator tag to your site in your head, which I previously wrote about here.

Knight published this at the beginning of the month when Mastodon 4.3 was released, but the instance where I run my personal Mastodon account was only updated recently. I like this addition. It removes the need for centralized verification — which can be confusing — and allows any publisher to confirm the legitimacy of individual authors and their work at once.

October 27, 2024 ⌥

You Can Use Clean Up With a Clear Conscience ⇥ sixcolors.com

Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors:

The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.

There are clearly ways that image editing tools can overreach. But Clean Up is one of the times when it is valid to compare its effects to those of Photoshop. It is, in fact, the lack of any retouching tools in Apple’s iOS Photos app which has been conspicuous. The difference between the tools available for years in third-party editing apps and Apple’s, though, is in its simplicity — you really do only need to circle an area to remove a distracting element, and it often works pretty well.

Regardless of whether Apple’s A.I. efforts are less advanced than those of its peers or if this is a deliberate decision, I hope we continue to see similar restraint. Image Playgrounds is not tasteful to my eyes, but at least none of it looks photorealistic.

October 25, 2024 ⌥

Apple Says It Believes Spatial Images Are the Future of Photography and, in Some Ways, Memory ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel:

Some might believe that Apple isn’t invested in the future of the [Vision] platform either given the niche appeal or the high price, but after speaking with Della Huff (a member of the Product Marketing team at Apple, who oversees all things Camera app and Photos app) and Billy Sorrentino (a member of the the Apple Design Team who works across the company’s entire product line), I left feeling that Apple has every intention of pushing forward in this space.

The two explain that Apple is very much invested in Vision Pro and visionOS because it views the experience they provide as integral to the future of photography. Coming from the company that makes the most popular camera on the planet, that opinion carries significant weight.

I do not mean to be cynical but, well, does it carry significant weight? Of course Apple believes the Vision Pro is the best way to experience photos and videos. The company spent years developing technologies to make the system feel immersive and compelling so, at a minimum, it truly believes the effort was worth it. Also, it is not unreasonable to expect the company to justify the effort, especially after stories about executive retirements and production cutbacks. No wonder Apple is making sure people are aware it is still committed to the space.

But that is not the whole point of this article. The Apple employees interviewed argue — as before — that photos should be representative of an actual event, and that viewing them as an immersive three dimensional reconstruction is, psychologically, much closer to how our memory works. I would love for some bored neuroscientist to fact-check that claim because — and keep in mind I went to art school, so, pinch of salt — it seems to me to conflict with the known fragility of human memory. My suspicion is that this is one reason we are drawn to fuzzier representations of reality: the unique colour representation of film, or the imprecision of a needle reading a vinyl record.

I am not being facetious when I write that I am very curious about how well this actually works compared to standard photos or videos or, indeed, actual memories.

October 25, 2024 ⌥

Linking Directly to Text Fragments ⇥ alfy.blog

Ahmad Alfy:

My first encounter with text fragments was through links generated by Google Search results. Initially, I assumed it was a Chrome-specific feature and not part of a broader web standard. However, I soon realized that this functionality was actually built upon the open web, available to any browser that chooses to implement it.

As someone who writes essays containing citations, this is one of the nicest additions to the web that I wish was easier to use in Safari. What I, like Alfy, want to be able to do is highlight a specific phrase and copy a direct link.

Also, something I often forget is that you can link directly to specific pages of a PDF file by appending #page= and then the page number.

Update: Turns out Rogue Amoeba has a bookmarklet for putting a link to the selected text in your clipboard. Very nice. (Thanks to Nick Vance.)

October 23, 2024 ⌥

‘Everything Is a Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Trust Anything’ ⇥ youtube.com

Hank Green, who lives in Montana, spotted something weird with his mail-in ballot: in all categories, the Democrat candidate was listed last. That seemed odd. So he looked it up:

Since every district — and there’s a ton of them — is getting a different ballot anyway, the candidates on each ballet — it turns out — are in a different order.

To eliminate bias, the candidates are initially ordered in alphabetical order. But then, it gets shifted by one for every ballot in the sequence.

Clever.

Green quotes the saying “everything is a conspiracy theory if you don’t know anything” but, as he is wont to point out, that is negative and unkind. A better version, he says, is “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t trust anything”.

I like that.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

I’d add a caveat to that as well, though. You have to not trust anything and also not have the intellectual curiosity to find out what’s true. Hank is the kind of person who does have that intellectual curiosity. Even though he was initially concerned, before he spouted off, he did the research and found out that his concerns were unfounded.

I think Masnick’s addition is fair, but also a little redundant, I believe. Someone who lacks trust to the degree of believing fantastical tales about the world is also someone who, upon looking things up, will disregard what they are reading. Being intellectually curious requires trust: in others, to provide accurate information; and in oneself to admit a lack of knowledge, and be able to assess new information.

October 23, 2024 ⌥

The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

In an interview, Atlas said a private investigator they hired was offered a free trial of Babel Street, which the investigator was able to use to determine the home address and daily movements of mobile devices belonging to multiple New Jersey police officers whose families have already faced significant harassment and death threats.

[…]

Atlas says the Babel Street trial period allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics. In one video, an Atlas investigator showed how they isolated mobile devices seen in a New Jersey courtroom parking lot that was reserved for jurors, and then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.

Krebs describes a staggering series of demonstrations by the investigator for Atlas, plaintiff in a suit against Babel Street: precise location tracking of known devices, or dragnet-style tracking of a cluster of devices, basically anywhere. If you or I collected device locations and shared it with others, it would be rightly seen as creepy — at the very least. Yet these intrusive behaviours have been normalized. They are not. What they are doing ought to be criminal.

It is not just Babel Street. Other names have popped up over the years, including Venntel and Fog Data Science. Jack Poulson, who writes All-Source Intelligence, has an update on the former:

According to a public summary of a contract signed in early August, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry into the commercial cellphone location-tracking data broker Venntel and its parent company Gravy Analytics. […]

Gravy Analytics’ data, via Venntel, is apparently one of the sources for Babel Street’s tracking capabilities.

You might remember Babel Street; I have linked to [several stories][st] about the company. This reporting was most often done by Byron Tau, then at the Wall Street Journal, and Joseph Cox, then at Vice. Tau wrote a whole book about the commercial surveillance apparatus. Both reporters were also invited to the same demo as Krebs saw; Tau’s story, at Notus, is login-walled:

The demonstration offers a rare look into how easily identifiable people are in these location-based data sets, which brokers claim are “anonymized.”

Such claims do not hold up to scrutiny. The tools in the hands of capable researchers, including law enforcement, can be used to identify specific individuals in many cases. Babel’s tool is explicitly marketed to intelligence analysts and law enforcement officers as a commercially available phone-tracking capability — a way to do a kind of surveillance that once required a search warrant inside the U.S. or was conducted by spy agencies when done outside the U.S.

Cox now writes at 404 Media:

Atlas also searched a school in Philadelphia, which returned nearly 7,000 devices. Due to the large number of phones, it is unlikely that these only include adult teachers, meaning that Babel Street may be holding onto data belonging to children too.

All these stories are worth your time. Even if you are already aware of this industry. Even if you remember that vivid New York Times exploration of an entirely different set of data brokers published six years ago. Even if you think Apple is right to allow users to restrict access to personal data.

This industry is still massive and thriving. It is still embedded in applications on many of our phones, by way of third-party SDKs for analytics, advertising, location services, and more. And it is deranged that the one government that can actually do something about this — the United States — is doing so one company and one case at a time. Every country should be making it illegal to do what Babel Street is capable of. But perhaps it is too rich a source.

October 22, 2024 ⌥

Hulu and Disney Plus No Longer Support App Store Payments ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Disney is no longer allowing its customers to sign up for and purchase subscriptions to Hulu or Disney+ through Apple’s App Store, cutting out any subscription fees that Disney would have needed to pay to Apple for using in-app purchase.

As of writing a day after Disney made this change, Disney Plus is still listed as a member on Apple’s Video Partner Program page. I wrote about that program four years ago in the context of Apple seemingly retconning it into being a longstanding and “established” option available to developers of media applications.

Joe Rosensteel:

More importantly, Disney is increasingly concerned with flexible tiers and bundles so that they can charge more. Especially when Disney launches their ESPN service later, which is almost guaranteed to be incredibly expensive. Disney will try to offset that with bundles. I’m sure Disney might even want to toy around with locking people into yearly subscriptions paid on a monthly basis, à la cable TV.

Despite Apple being Disney’s BFF, Disney needs to have infrastructure to handle all these bundles and tiers, which will be very expensive, so why involve Apple acting as a glorified payment processor?

It is hard to feel anything at all, really, about the business decisions of one massive conglomerate compared to another. But Apple’s subscription management is — in a vacuum and distinct from anything else — one of the nicest around, and it ultimately hurts users that it is so unattractive to some developers when given other options.

On a related note, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission just announced a final set of rules to make cancelling a subscription as easy as starting it. Michael Tsai:

While it was good that in some cases customers could get easier cancellation by paying for an additional layer such as the App Store, I think it makes sense to just make these bad practices illegal.

I am in full agreement. The FTC’s policies are a good idea and should be copied by every national or supranational consumer protection body.

October 22, 2024 ⌥

Letting the Joke Overtake the Source Material ⇥ tumblr.com

Hayden Anhedönia, who you might know as Ethel Cain:

I just feel as though there’s a lack of sincerity in the world these days. I speak from personal experience as an artist putting things out into the world, yes, but also as a human being interacting with other human beings on the regular, and I have had my sentiments echoed by many other friends of mine over the past year or so, both artists and non-artists alike. Most of this will be framed through the consumption of art, because that’s my own personal passion in this life of mine, but also the way we interface with each other and process the world around us. […]

I do not know that the internet is becoming less sincere with time, but it sure feels like there is often an unwillingness to engage directly with a topic. How often do you see questions in local subreddits answered with jokes, or stories of horrific events replied to with no emotional intelligence? This has always been an issue in different pockets of the web — and in the real world — but it seems to get worse the larger and looser-knit the group becomes, like if a recommendations-based social media platform yanks something out of context and thrusts it before a whole different audience.

Jokes are fine. But not every reply chain or comment thread needs to become a place to try new bits for a never-to-be-performed standup routine.

October 21, 2024 ⌥

Risks and Harms, and Youth and Social Media ⇥ zephoria.substack.com

danah boyd:

Since the “social media is bad for teens” myth will not die, I keep having intense conversations with colleagues, journalists, and friends over what the research says and what it doesn’t. (Alice Marwick et. al put together a great little primer in light of the legislative moves.) Along the way, I’ve also started to recognize how slipperiness between two terms creates confusion — and political openings — and so I wanted to call them out in case this is helpful for others thinking about these issues.

In short, “Does social media harm teenagers?” is not the same question as “Can social media be risky for teenagers?”

This is pretty clearly a response to arguments pushed by people like Dr. Jonathan Haidt. One thing he often laments is the decline in kids walking to school and, he says, playing outside with relatively little supervision. This is something he also griped about in his previous book “The Coddling of the American Mind”, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. If you start poking around a little, the factors parents’ cite for their reluctance to allow kids to get to school independently are safety risks: drivers, vehicles, roads, and strangers. You see it in articles from Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These are undoubtably risks but, as Haidt himself points out in supplemental material for “Coddling”, efforts should be made to “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”.

Then again, why not both? Kids can be educated on how to use new technologies responsibly and platforms can be pressured to reduce abuses and hostile behaviour. Legislators should be passing privacy-protecting laws. But, as boyd writes, “I don’t think that these harms are unique to children”. If we design roads which are safer for children, they will probably also be safer for everyone — but that does not eliminate risk. A similar effect can be true of technology, too. (I just finished “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”. I found the writing often insufferable, but it is still worth reading.)

I do not have a stake in this game beyond basic humanity and a desire for people to be healthy. I have no expertise in this area. I find it plausible it is difficult to disentangle the influence of social media from other uses of a smartphone and from the broader world. I am not entirely convinced social media platforms have little responsibility for how youth experience their online environment, but I am even less convinced Haidt’s restrictive approach makes sense.

See Also: On the same day boyd’s essay was published, Dr. Candice Odgers and Haidt debated this topic live.

Sponsor: Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari ⇥ magiclasso.co