2025-03-08 05:05:26
It's incredibly rare for Apple to announce a delay to one of its products. But that's exactly what it's just done with its advanced Siri features, which were due out soon and are now not going to make it till towards the back end of the year – I expect it to be released in the next iOS upgrade cycle now.
I think this delay reveals something fundamental about the world's most successful tech company and its relationship with innovation. Consider this telling coincidence: In the same year that OpenAI released GPT-3, one of the first truly large-scale LLMs, Apple executed a 4-for-1 stock split. That juxtaposition tells us everything we need to know about why Apple now finds itself playing catch-up in the AI revolution.
The pattern is depressingly familiar in successful businesses. A company achieves spectacular success, then gradually shifts its focus from transformative innovation to shareholder value – dividends, stock splits, and the comforting predictability of incremental improvements. Meanwhile, the future takes shape elsewhere, often in messier, less immediately profitable corners of the industry.
Apple has long been characterised as a "fast follower" rather than a pioneering innovator. It wasn't the first to make an MP3 player, smartphone, or even a personal computer. This strategy served Apple brilliantly in the past – observing others' mistakes, then delivering exquisitely refined products with unmatched attention to design, usability, and integration. The first iPhone wasn't novel in concept, but revolutionary in execution because it had a unique interface: multitouch. In fact, I would argue this was the last time Apple’s user interfaces went in a bold direction.
But AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. This isn't merely a new product category to be perfected – it's a paradigm shift in how humans interact with technology. Unlike hardware innovations where Apple could polish existing concepts, AI is redefining the entire computing experience, from point-click or touch-tap to conversations. The interface layer between humans and devices is transforming in ways that might render Apple's traditional advantages increasingly irrelevant.
More troubling still is the misalignment between Apple's business model and AI's trajectory. Apple thrives on high-margin hardware in a controlled ecosystem, while AI is primarily software and services-driven, often benefiting from openness and scale. If computing evolves toward AI-first, conversational experiences, Apple's hardware prowess and locked down approach could become secondary considerations for consumers.
While Apple has been meticulously crafting its spatial computing future with Vision Pro, the company has stumbled in the AI present – a misstep that may prove costly in ways Tim Cook's spreadsheets cannot yet quantify.
The postponement of the new Siri features isn't merely a scheduling hiccup; it's a revealing moment that exposes the company's strategic blind spot. There's a profound irony here: the company that tantalised us with the Knowledge Navigator concept in 1987 – a remarkably prescient vision of conversational computing – has become the technological equivalent of an absentee parent, promising to show up for the AI revolution but repeatedly texting that it's running late.
The billions poured into Vision Pro reflect Apple's hardware-obsessed DNA, a comfortable space where the company can control every micron of the experience. Meanwhile, the messy, evolving landscape of conversational AI – the interface revolution actually happening now – has been left to competitors who embraced the chaos and imperfection inherent in emerging technologies.
This isn't to say Vision Pro lacks merit. It's a spectacular achievement in many ways. But Apple appears to have backed the wrong horse in the race for the next transformative interface. While OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have been rapidly iterating their AI offerings in public, Apple has been polishing a headset that, however brilliant, remains peripheral to how most of us will interact with technology tomorrow.
A company that once moved boldly – because it had to in order to survive – now moves more cautiously, weighed down by its success. Each financial quarter brings big profits but perhaps diminishing courage and ambition. The adventurous and playful spirit that conceived the Knowledge Navigator and made a big bet on multitouch interfaces has been displaced by the conservative instincts of a company with too much to lose.
What Apple needs now is precisely what brought it back from the brink in the late '90s: bravery. Rather than simply building on the iPhone, work out how to tear it down. Perhaps it will even take a skunkworks project unburdened by the company's current success metrics, free to reimagine the fundamental relationship between humans and machines. A space where failure is acceptable if it teaches valuable lessons about conversational computing.
Apple isn't out of the AI race, but it's running with untied shoelaces, and it keeps tripping up. The question isn't whether it can catch up technically – its resources ensure that's possible – but whether it can rediscover the institutional courage to embrace the messiness of revolutionary change. In today's tech landscape, playing it safe might be the riskiest strategy of all.
2025-03-01 23:29:36
Sergey Brin wants Googlers to work 60 hours a week in the office, so the company can develop AGI, which will then mean they can make more of their employees unemployed.
Sure, sounds like a great deal to me!
Of course, Brin also thought parachuting into the event where Google Glass was announced was also a great idea. So there is that.
Framework, which makes laptops which can actually be upgraded, repaired and generally played around with, has announced several new products, all of which look really quite good.
At some point in the not too distant future I will have to replace my old Linux laptop – it’s got a couple of years of life left in it, but it won’t last forever. At that point I’ll be getting a Framework.
Proton, the Swiss company that makes privacy-focused email, storage and other services, has written about the UK’s lame attempt to get Apple to break its end-to-end encryption measures. They make it clear their approach would be different: they will not compromise their encryption, and will not prevent UK-based users from accessing their services.
The reason they can do is comes down to Switzerland:
We can take these stances because of the strong legal protections we receive as a Swiss company. The Swiss Federal Constitution explicitly establishes a right to privacy, and unlike other democracies, Switzerland has never considered legislation targeting end-to-end encryption. Switzerland is also not a part of EU or US jurisdiction, meaning that even if those governments pass laws that weaken end-to-end encryption, they would not be enforceable in Switzerland.
Proton aren’t the only company that still provides end-to-end encrypted storage, but they are one of the few which are effectively beyond the reach of laws like the UKs.
And speaking of privacy, which in these dark times we must, if you develop using Xcode on the Mac you may not be aware that the software is pretty-much constantly sending data to Apple.
Jeff Johnson was curious about some of the times that compiling his apps took, and found it was essentially spending 50 seconds of a 56.8 second build waiting for a response from an Apple server. The more he delved into the details of what Xcode was communicating, the worse it got.
In the end, he came to a simple conclusion: “Xcode is a developer analytics collection mechanism, whether you like it or not, which I don’t.”
In yet another chapter of tech's constant reshuffling of digital real estate, Microsoft has announced the retirement of Skype, a platform that once promised to revolutionise how we connected. Come May 2025, the service that introduced millions to video calling will fade into the digital sunset, replaced by the consumer version of Microsoft Teams. Yes. Teams.
The transition offers existing users a relatively painless migration path – contacts, message histories and group chats will transfer seamlessly to Teams with no new account required. Alternatively, users can export their data to venture elsewhere in the digital communications landscape.
What's notably vanishing is Skype's telephony functionality – the ability to call traditional phone numbers both domestically and internationally. Microsoft's executives frame this as responding to evolving usage patterns, with Vice President Amit Fulay noting that higher bandwidth and cheaper data plans have rendered such services increasingly obsolete as users shift to VoIP.
The retirement marks not just a product transition, but the quiet end of an era in digital communication. I remember when Skype first started offering plans which – for just a few bucks – gave you unlimited calls anywhere in the world. For a journalist who spent their life calling people up, that was a big deal.
As millions of workers are summoned back to their offices, an unsettling surveillance infrastructure awaits them. Sophie Charara's WIRED investigation reveals a landscape where warehouse-style employee tracking has infiltrated white-collar environments. From under-desk sensors and ceiling-mounted cameras to WiFi networks that monitor movement patterns, employers are deploying increasingly invasive technologies to track productivity, attendance, and behaviour.
The justification—preventing "time theft"—masks deeper motivations: distrust, control, and preparation for AI-driven job cuts. Yet research consistently shows these systems damage trust, increase anxiety, and fundamentally misunderstand what makes knowledge work effective.
When employers begin from a position of suspicion, workers reciprocate with disengagement. As one expert notes, the relationship becomes purely transactional: "If you don't trust me, I'm not going to trust you." This erosion of workplace culture may be the surveillance state's most damaging consequence for business.
Grok, the AI part of X, got caught spinning responses in a way which prevented it from surfacing posts which accused either Elon Musk or Donald Trump of spreading misinformation:
Grok, Elon Musk’s ChatGPT competitor, temporarily refused to respond with “sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation,” according to xAI’s head of engineering, Igor Babuschkin.
Babuschkin promptly claimed this was an error, throwing an unnamed engineer under the bus:
In response to questions on X, Babuschkin said that Grok’s system prompt (the internal rules that govern how an AI responds to queries) is publicly visible “because we believe users should be able to see what it is we’re asking Grok.” He said “an employee pushed the change” to the system prompt “because they thought it would help, but this is obviously not in line with our values.”
There’s two different ways of looking at this, and a lot will depend on how you feel about Musk and/or Twitter/X. The first is positive – that Grok (unlike every other LLM you can think of) publishes their system prompts and so there’s a much greater level of transparency.
However, this depends on you actually trusting Musk/X – and a lot of people don’t trust him more than they can throw him. After all, could this just be a case of something being revealed that shouldn’t, but that’s actually in use in a hidden set of prompts?
Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt feels unwise, given the fact he consistently lies or uses half-truths about almost everything, from his involvement in the founding of Tesla through to how many kids he has.
Joan Westenberg captures the exhaustion of faux technological progress, where "innovation" means forcing QR code menus and extractive apps into every crevice of daily life. She articulates a growing weariness with tech that promises efficiency while delivering complexity, surveillance, and isolation.
As she points out, what’s currently being positioned as heretical "Luddism" is actually a rational response to technology that's creating problems and then selling subscription solutions to fix them.
Joan rejects the false binary between embracing Silicon Valley's vision and returning to the 1800s—she'd happily rewind to 2003, before Facebook colonised our social lives.
This post will resonate with anyone who's ever longed for a world less mediated, less optimised, and more fundamentally human. She embraces tech skepticism as clarity, not fear. And she’s right.
The iPhone remains a beautifully crafted digital fortress (unless EU regulations have opened your particular gate) whilst Android has largely abandoned its open-source promises, in spirit if not (yet in fact). For those concerned with digital privacy, this means installing alternative systems like GrapheneOS or Murena – essentially "de-Googled" versions of Android that return control to your hands.
Thankfully, this digital liberation isn't the technical gauntlet it once was. You can now purchase devices with these privacy-focused alternatives pre-installed, sparing yourself the technical tinkering. Whilst mobile phones led this quiet revolution, tablets have lagged behind – until now.
Murena has begun offering Google's rather impressive Pixel Tablet with its privacy-respecting operating system pre-installed. It comes with full warranty protection, ongoing support, and retains all the qualities that make the hardware quite good. It’s just not going to be telling Google exactly what you are doing every few seconds.
2025-02-23 18:20:30
Printers are probably the most maligned of all technologies. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- hates their printer. But why?
Well, blame HP. HP pioneered some of the most egregious practices in tech, such as subscriptions for ink which won't let you print unless you pay (even if you have ink in your tanks). It's also been a big user of intellectual property as a method of locking in customers, by using little cryptographic handshakes between printer and ink cartridge to stop you refilling them. It is, in short, one of the kings of enshittification.
Not content with all this, the company decided to try something else to make its customers lives worse: an automatic 15 minute delay if you call their customer service lines. This reduces their costs by pushing customers towards either self service web pages (cheap) or just giving up (even cheaper).
But for once, HP has not got its own way. Within a day of announcing this "improvement", the company was forced to backtrack by customers who just weren't going to take it anymore. As Cory puts it, "even in these degraded times, we can get these fuckers." Hopefully we can do it again, and again.
Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is a great way of maximising your security if you use Apple products with iCloud. Turn on ADP and no one other than yourself can get access to your files stored in iCloud Drive. Even Apple can't get into them.
Of course, this kind of encryption -- known as zero-access -- infuriates governments, who want to be able to get into files when they believe you're up to no good. And they would very much like you not to know if you're being spied on. Hence the UK government's insistence that it can force companies like Apple to put in "backdoors" even on this kind of encryption.
Apple disagrees, and rather than put in a backdoor for the UK, it's removing the option for users here to use ADP. The positive point of this is the UK government can't now spy on any iCloud user globally. The negative is no ADP for UK users.
Why is zero-access encryption important? Partly it's down to the potential for backdoors of this kind to open up the potential for cybercrime. But for some kinds of people -- journalists, activists -- it's just essential. If you're a journalist, the last thing you want is for governments to have secret access to your work, your sources and more.
So what are the options if you're an Apple user? Well, not Google Drive or Dropbox: both of those services are just as (in)secure as iCloud Drive. Instead, look to services like Proton or Mega, both of which offer zero-access file storage online at reasonable prices. Having ADP was great, but we move on.
You might have noticed that Amazon has decided to make sure you rent your ebooks rather than owning them by shutting off the ability to download the files and -- potentially -- convert them into a format which doesn't depend on them. You have about a week to download them, which if you're like me and have hundreds of Kindle books, is a pain in the backside.
But if you're on a Mac, there are ways to do this in bulk, and Jason Snell has written up a great guide. It takes a little bit of command line magic, but follow the instructions and you can download your files in minutes instead of hours.
Not content with being the world’s biggest advertising company, Google wants to make sure that you see ads. This of course has been the end-game of creating their own browser since the start. And it’s why I don’t use Chrome. How the web looks should be up to you, not to anyone else, and definitely not to a self-serving ad business.
Via JWZ comes this list of games where you can spend your time shooting, stabbing and sucking the blood from the worst people in the world. I particularly like the last one. No reason.
Once upon a time, the Mac’s hardware was more or less industry-standard. An Intel chip, a relatively standard motherboard and bios, memory and drives which weren’t soldered on to a single package. All of this was pretty good for users, as it meant Macs were much more upgradeable and repairable than they are today.
But there are another advantage: it meant that you could, with a bit of hacking, run Mac OS on machines that weren’t from Apple, and definitely weren’t designed with this purpose in mind. This was the era of the Hackintosh.
It was also the era of the netbook, a low cost laptop based on simple hardware, running either Windows XP or Linux. Steve Jobs famously didn’t like them, but I definitely did, and owned several, from the OG eeePC through the MSI Wind to the Dell Mini 10.
And the best thing was you could combine the two. In fact, the MSI Wind became a favoured platform for making a Hackintosh, combining low cost with just about enough performance to run light Mac applications. Brian Chen, now of the New York Times but then with Wired, spent several months living with a MSI Wind Hackintosh as his main portable machine, and predictable it wasn’t exactly a perfect experience.
But I would love Apple to make a Mac-based computer of that kind of size, something portable and light with the kind of battery life which can be achieved these days with ARM and better power management. Not an iPad. A Mac. Can you do it Apple? Come on, make my day.
Look, you should all know by now that platforms which lock you in are, someday, going to abuse you. So why not help out Matrix?
Matrix is a communication app, similar in function to commercial platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, but with a crucial difference: it's open and decentralised. It's designed to let people communicate securely and privately via instant messaging, VoIP, video calls, and other means, while giving users full control over their data. Unlike centralised platforms, Matrix allows users to choose their own servers (or even host their own), fostering a more open and resilient network. This decentralised nature also promotes interoperability, allowing users to connect with others on different Matrix-based platforms.
And the Matrix Foundation needs your help to keep developing it. So if you want to have alternatives, bung them a few bucks.
Acer is the first computer maker to up their prices because of Trump’s tariffs, but they won’t be the last. So much FAFO, so little time.
As most of you know, I moved from Substack a long time ago -- first to WordPress, then on to Ghost. The reasons for this were partly political (I don’t want to be part of platforms that reward Nazis and bigots) and partly practical (Substack is just horrible to use).
But here’s another good reason: if you’re a creator, Substack is horribly expensive. Micah Lee has run the numbers, and as soon as you get any significant number of paid subscribers, you will end up paying thousands of dollars more to Substack than Ghost.
Always remember: “free” is never free when you’re dealing with a rapacious, VC-funded company.
OverVUE isn’t a name that most of you will know. But for the past FORTY years, it and its successor Mac database products have been keeping developer Jim Rea busy. I love stories like this.
2025-02-22 02:56:03
OK, so perhaps it's time to post something about what Apple’s Advanced Data Protection is, what it does, and why it's inaccurate to say that Apple is "removing iCloud end-to-end encryption". Bear in mind I am simplifying, but only slightly and mainly so I don't have to write a 3000 word essay.
There are three kinds of encryption which often get conflated. In-transit encryption in its classic sense is simply encrypting something at the senders end, and decrypting it at the intended receiver. It basically stops your message or file being read in transit. It's also sometimes used to mean it must also be stored in an encrypted form at the receivers end. This ain’t necessarily so: and it doesn't always mean the file can't be read, either.
Encryption-at-rest means that the files at the receivers' end are definitely stored in an encrypted format. This means that only you, and the company that provides the storage, hold keys which can decrypt those files.
Zero-access or zero-knowledge encryption takes this a step further, by removing the ability for the service provider to decrypt the files. Effectively, only you hold a decryption key. The company itself can never read your data.
Zero-access is sometimes called end-to-end encryption (including by Apple) reflecting that files are encrypted and inaccessible to anyone unauthorised at every step of the way. However, you'll also see end-to-end meaning in-transit, particularly in older documents. Hence, I try and avoid the phrase entirely.
Why is this important from a privacy/security standpoint? Because many governments around the world can, and do, have laws on the books which allow courts to order a service provider to give them access to your files in a decrypted form. If the company holds a decryption key - which it always does with anything less than zero-access systems - it can always give law enforcement your files.
Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and the "standard" iCloud all use both end-to-end encryption where files are encrypted-at-rest. No one can access your files, except you, people at the company who have access to decryption keys (this is always a very small number of people for obvious reasons) and law enforcement/spooks with the right paperwork.
Apple's Advanced Data Protection system, which was introduced in 2022, optionally allowed a user to switch to zero-access encryption for most iCloud services. This placed it above Google et al in terms of security and privacy. Most iCloud users have never turned it on. It's mostly people like me, who might have a need for higher levels of security, who did.
Governments generally hate zero-access encryption, because it stops them being able to get to data without the person they are monitoring knowing about it. Without it, they can simply get a secret court order which allows them ongoing access, and to be fair to them that is understandable when you're dealing with serious, ongoing crime, from drug smuggling to child abuse to large-scale cybercrime.
But although it's understandable, it's also dangerous. And the UK law is particularly bad, as it purports to allow the government access to to any account not just in the UK, but anywhere. This means, for example, that the UK could gain access to a US account, and pass that information on to the US government -- effectively circumventing US legal protections on surveillance.
So what's happening here? First, we don't yet have all the details. What we do know is that ADP will no longer be available in the UK. The most likely outcome is that UK users will effectively drop down to the "standard" level of security. That means files will be encrypted end-to-end, and at-rest, but not zero-access. Apple will hold a decryption key which will allow it to respond to any court orders for data access, as it (and Google, and Microsoft, and Dropbox) can and does at the moment for anyone who hasn't turned on ADP.
How many people will this affect? Only Apple knows that, but it's fair to say that opting into ADP is probably not done by the majority of users. It's been fairly hidden, and turning it on does impose some restrictions which I suspect most "normal" users would find annoying. So, for most Apple users, nothing much is really changing.
And it's worth saying again: what Apple is offering is still as good as Google, Microsoft, etc, none of which offer zero-access encryption for file storage. There are remarkably few companies that do: the only one I've come across is Proton, whose Proton Drive is hosted in Switzerland, subject to Swiss privacy laws, and zero-access encrypted by default. If you’re currently using Advanced Data Protection for file storage, they are worth a look.
Whoops. This turned into an essay. Ah well.
2025-02-15 01:40:51
When it comes to building a media business based on subscriptions there is probably no one in the world who has “been there, done that” as much as Chris Duncan. Chris worked on The Times’ transition to an online paywalled model (successful) and then on The Sun’s version (not so successful). I was lucky enough to work with Bauer and he’s one of the smartest people I have met in the media.
Since leaving Bauer, Chris has been doing a bit of consultancy work and has now started his own Substack. This post on subscriptions models is all about a theme might just help you learn from some of his mistakes, and it’s highly recommended.
Matt Gemmell is (as well as being a lovely man) one of the world’s biggest proponents of the iPad – and has been using one as his only device for quite a few years. Now he’s gone back to using the Mac, and I can sympathise. I love my iPad to bits, but it’s a lot of faff to use as your only computer, even compared to other “limited” devices like a Chromebook. A “real” computer remains a better option for almost everyone.
Oh, Apple! Not content with currying favour with Trump with Tim Cook’s personal donation of $1m to the inauguration fund, the company is rolling over and begging Elon Musk to tickle its tummy by advertising back on Nu-Gab (AKA Twitter, AKA X, AKA Elon’s bullypit). Apple does some good things, but Tim Cook is not a brave man.
When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV. And I mean a lot. I was essentially glued to the box at all hours. This is one of the reasons I don’t really go for the moral panic about kids being glued to their phones – I was just as glued to a screen, it was just a bigger one.
The big difference between then and now was the lack of choice. I grew up with three channels of TV to watch, all of which ended at about 11pm. Until I was six, ITV didn’t even bother broadcasting in the afternoon, and the BBC continued this practice for a few more years.
This lack of choice meant you watched whatever was on, and sometimes this was something educational on BBC2. That’s how I came to know Stuart Hall, one of the finest social scientists and media commentators of all time. And it was pleasing to see this article about Hall and his work on media codes. It’s a brilliant read, and one which - in the age of Trump and Musk - also a vital one.
Zizians. Cults aren’t a new thing, but there are so many tropes in this one which involve the kind of terminally online people who are, in some ways, defining the age. It’s fascinating and horrifying in equal measure.
I’m old, but not old enough to remember the cat meat man. Men (mostly) who wandered around with barrows of meat (mostly) for cats (mostly). And would, apparently, be occasionally attacked by packs of marauding dogs. You want to read this.
The Verge has been my favourite tech publication for a long time, but since it transitioned to a subscription model if feels like it’s got both braver and punchier. Elizabeth Lopatto’s piece on what Elon Musk is doing to the US government is a case in point – “unscheduled disassembly” is a lovely way to put it, as it’s the wording that often accompanies the break-up of a rocket in flight. However, unlike most rocket crashes, this is deliberate.
And speaking of Musk, James Watt would very much like you to know that he likes and admires Elon and would love to be the British equivalent. The founder of BrewDog - a particularly shitty brand of beer which relies more on marketing than tasting like anything other than animal piss – has set up “Shadow Doge”, which he says will take on the UK government and make it more frugal.
Watt is a douche, but he does have one thing in common with Musk: he’s happy to take a sack load of government money while simultaneously saying the government spends too much. Can we have our three million quid back now, James? Or have you spent it on crap check shirts? Remember kids, every accusation is a confession!
Kathleen Hanna is one of the greatest people alive, and I will fight the man (and it’s always men) who believes otherwise.
2025-02-09 18:45:51
This week, I’m a little late as every time I thought I had finished, there was another change to one of the items. Events, dear boy… anyway, on with the programme!
Apple’s Advanced Data Protection system is pretty secure. Essentially, everything apart from mail, contacts, and calendars is encrypted end-to-end and at rest, and only you have a key to it. Apple can’t read your iCloud files, messages, phone back-ups, and more – which means that it can’t hand over the key to a search warrant either.
Of course, this isn’t good enough for governments round the world. They would love to have access to that data. They claim this is for legitimate law enforcement purposes, usually something connected with child pornography or terrorism, the two go-to excuses for surveillance.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 gave the government a way around this. It allowed the government to demand, using a “technical capability notice”, that companies which encrypt data in this way create a backdoor allowing the authorities to access this data when it needs to. Merely revealing that a request has been made is a criminal offence.
Apple is the first target for this kind of order, at least that we know of. And, if you’re an Apple user, it should make you stop and think about whether you should be using iCloud services, for two reasons.
First, regardless of where you are in the world, this gives the UK government the ability to access your data for a given set of reasons. And remember that the UK is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, so — in theory — the CIA could request the UK intelligence to get data on a US citizen, without proper oversight.
But more importantly, backdoors into this kind of system are giant targets for criminals, bad hackers and foreign intelligence services. When you make a backdoor, it’s there for anyone who finds it to use – and often, illegitimate users are good enough at covering their tracks so that they get away with it for years.
If this concerns you, it’s worth looking at alternatives like Proton Drive, which is outside UK and US jurisdiction and which follows stricter privacy laws. The other alternative is to move to keeping files locally, but that — of course — means losing the ability to sync files across different platforms.
Apple will hopefully resist this to the full extent of the law. But if its past public comments are anything to do by, if it loses, it may well remove some services from the UK — most likely turning off the ability for UK citizens to access Advanced Data Protection rather than building in a backdoor.
It’s an easy comparison to make between the “throw the book at him” approach the US government took to Aaron Swartz’s mild case of piracy to the inevitable crickets which will follow the revelation that Meta torrented 81.7 terabytes of pirated books to train its LLMs. I don’t think we will see Mark Zuckerberg threatened with 35 years prison time, mores the pity, despite the fact he personally approved breaking the law.
Via Ben Werdmuller – who you should be reading regularly – comes this guide to using Signal for government workers, something that’s very timely in the Trump era. Government workers can, and should, be organising (legal) resistance to Trump, but doing so over less private systems will be dangerous given Trump’s love of (illegal) reprisals. Using Signal can help.
Related: If you want to send me messages via Signal, you can!
Well, of course, Apple doesn’t want to lose $20bn of annual revenue, which delivers about as close to a 100% margin as you can get.
I'm surprised that the CEO of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce, and Manufacture has forgotten that much of the historical imperative to regulate came from abuse by manufacturing and commerce.
Haldane's point that "a brick-by-brick dismantling of a high-rise tower cannot shift regulatory cultures and practices" is grim, given we are just about to dismantle a high-rise tower which was a monument to regulatory capture and greed that cost 72 people their lives. As The Observer noted after the Grenfell report, "the government left most of the job of regulation to for-profit organisations funded directly by those they were regulating in a deadly conflict of interest." Haldane's brilliant idea seems to be, "get rid of the regulation."
Haldane is right that regulation, like much British law, has happened by accretion and so is incredibly complex to navigate for businesses and citizens alike. He's also right that regulatory enforcement should start with punitive measures for executives, which would focus the mind of the people at the top.
But the idea that "seek forgiveness not permission" is the best approach — or, to put it another way, regulate when it goes wrong and people die — is mind-melting stupid. We did that in the 19th Century, Andy. Perhaps the ghost of George Brewster could give you some help remembering your history.
Jamie Bartlett has written about what parking apps tell us about the British and their relationship to technology. It’s all great, but this sums it up:
Progress isn’t about things being turned into an app: it’s also about making tasks easier, safer, simpler. And not everything is made better just because it can be done on a mobile phone. Until we realise this, we will continue to forge ahead with the short-sightedness of teenager, always convinced that this time technology will fix it for us. Only to find ourselves in an administrative cul-de-sac from which there is no escape.
And speaking of terrible technology, Terence Eden has written a post about WhatThreeWords, the frankly stupid system for sharing locations which takes a public good — maps — and turns it into a private, proprietary system which doesn’t work that well.
It’s a system beloved of a certain kind of marketer, which is why its business model – selling licences to car companies and other suckers to use commercially – was what it was. But now it appears that some companies aren’t renewing their licences, including Mercedes, which is actually a part owner of the business. That kind of tells you how low the usage is.
WhatThreeWords is a terrible idea, both technically poor and an example of an attempt by a private company to capture a market. Avoid like the plague.
For a wide variety of reasons, I don’t consider myself to be a Marxist (a communist, yes, but that’s another thing entirely and a different story). But while I don’t believe in the inevitability of a working-class revolution, I think Marx’s analysis of the relationship between classes and the power structures of capitalism has stood the test of time and, in fact, got more relevant.
That’s why this piece by John Ganz is pretty astounding, the best article on how we have ended up with tech oligarchy that I’ve seen. Well worth a read.
Elon Musk moved fast and broke Twitter. Now he’s moving fast and breaking the government, which in turn means breaking some of the poorest people in America. And all while presenting a huge security risk which other countries will no doubt exploit.
If the oligarchs have captured the US, we should remember that it’s not enough for them: they want the world:
Tech billionaires like Thiel simply do not believe that their companies and investments should be beholden to governments. And now that they have control of the US government, they are suggesting that, if any other countries interfere with their business, the US government ought to intervene on their behalf.
Digital colonialism, here we come. Or here we are, depending on how bad you think it all really is.
