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.
2025-02-01 01:47:41
A great thread by Mordy Oberstein, who highlights something that I have been saying for a while: SEO should not define and lead your content strategy. This doesn’t mean SEO is unimportant or of secondary interest to publishers – it is still going to account for the majority of your traffic after all. But the days when it was the be-all and end-all of determining what you should create are over, and a strategy which focuses on meeting keyword needs rather than human needs will fail. Reach should take note.
A little under fifteen years ago I met a bloke in Basingstoke train station’s car park and bought an iPad. It wasn’t available in the UK at launch but there was no way that I wasn’t going to get one as soon as I could. He had been over on a trip to the states, and bought one back for sale -- and it didn’t really cost me much more than retail, which was nice.
I’m not sure how I feel about the iPad, still. Om Malik has written a pretty good summary of his feelings about the device, and I concur with much of it. Meanwhile, Federico Viticci has bounced back to using an iPad Pro full time. Even though my needs are relatively limited, and all of the apps I use on a daily basis are on the iPad, I don’t think I could do that. It is, though, pretty tempting.
Google is back in EU court, this time appealing against its €4.1bn fine to the Court of Justice. This is the last chance — there is no higher court — and it seems unlikely to win. Why it’s bothering, I don’t know. Perhaps it thinks The Donald will ride to the rescue.
One of the most amusing genre of TikTok video is the “what are your pronouns?” format. You ask a conservative American what their pronouns are, they answer “I don’t use pronouns” and you laugh at their inability to realise that “I” is, itself, a pronoun. Honestly, go look them up, they’re hours of fun.
I never thought, though, that I would see the US Federal Government make the same mistake. But this is an administration run by idiots, who seem intent of seeing quite how much they are drag the country into a well of stupidity before things collapse. Which, sadly, probably won’t be long.
I’ve used Bookshop.org to buy my print books for a while, and now it’s started selling ebooks too. Only in the US for now (unless you have a US-based credit card), but I’m looking forward to it expanding to the UK at some point.
So much of this Reid Hoffman article on “making AI work for us” reads like someone who didn’t have any friends when they were a child and now wants a robot friend who is wise, kind and doesn’t try to steal their lunch money. It would be sad if these guys weren’t bending the world to their will.
Kudos to Google for open sourcing the Pebble operating system. And I’m really looking forward to getting a Pebble this time round
One of the dirty little secrets of modern capitalism is that finance largely revolves around gambling rather than genuinely supporting businesses or individuals. In the case of the UK, lending to companies and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services amounted to just 3% of total lending. As John Lanchester puts it, “lending money where it’s needed is what the modern form of finance, for the most part, does not do.” It’s a great long read, and you should spend the half hour it will absorb you for.
Sadly Lina Khan is gone from the FTC, but on the way out she fired a broadside at private equity and warned of the risks to the US economy if it’s not controlled correctly. Which of course Trump is not going to do. So long Lina, and thanks for at least giving it a go.
2025-01-24 22:49:59
Why are people often anti-AI? Because of things like this. Honestly, please don't use AI to try to break strikes, especially if you're a so-called liberal newspaper.
The market for devices used in medicine is huge, and the prices for devices which, after all, are involved in saving people's lives are high. The Advanced Perfusion System 1 Heart Lung Machine by Terumo Cardiovascular, for example, costs in six figures for every machine and hospitals might have millions of dollars worth at every facility.
Imagine their surprise, then, when they were informed by Terumo that they were no longer allowed to service the machines they owned, and would now need to buy a service plan — at a huge annual cost.
This is prime enshittification territory. The company is using the leverage it has to prevent repair and extort — and I am happy using that word — more money from its customers. Capitalism, eh?
You thought that Mark Zuckerberg's desire to get into the good books of Trump and all the weirdos and Nazis around him would begin and end at his changes in moderation policy and getting rid of a few pro-LGTBQ pieces of marketing? Oh you sweet summer child!
Instagram is now censoring content from abortion providers, and hiding their profiles from search. Let that sink in a little.
Far from Zuckerberg's policies being to “get to our roots” and raising the threshold for removing content, he is determined to curry favour with the administration by censoring things they don't like. Free speech? My ass. This is Trumpworld now.
This is just a wonderful essay on how much Trump and the current tech oligarchs are taking from imperialism. Long, but a highly recommended read.
Hang around in space nerd circles, and you may come across the idea that having a frontier — a place where people can build their own lives away from the choking hand of government — has a positive effect not only on them, but on society more broadly. This is the Turner thesis, based on the work of a 19th century historian called Frederick Jackson Turner.
This article is a GREAT history of Turnerism and its influence on space frontier fanatics like Elon Musk. In short, Turnerism predictably ignored (or worse) the experience of women, black people and Native Americans, and also got a lot wrong about both the experience of pioneers and the degree to which they were supported by (and interacted with) the government.
This is similar to how we see companies like SpaceX and Tesla, both of which have benefited from enormous levels of government support — and will now loot the taxpayers even more.
The Verge has a great look at the era of gangster tech regulation that we are moving into, where, having bought a government, big tech companies will expect their rewards. Expect fat government contracts, no antitrust regulation to them monopolistic behaviour, using the threat of tariffs ensures American companies get what they want, and lots, lots more.
By the way, now is an excellent time to read Karen Dawisha's Putin's Kleptocracy if you haven't already. That is, if you want a vision of how bad things could get in America. In particular:
From the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal... who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.
Sound like anyone you know?
There is an old saying that Microsoft software sucks badly until the third version, and I think that this dates back to Windows. Windows 1 was… well, lacking. Windows 2 wasn't much better. But with Windows 3, Microsoft finally got a GUI that was close enough to the Mac to be usable.
Liam Proven has written up a summary of a very, very long piece which looks at the history of Windows 3, and the lessons Microsoft learned along the way. It's a great read for nerds of a certain age (like me, basically).
Most Mac users of a certain age remember Power Computing, the Mac cloner that undercut Apple with better machines back in the mid-90s. Apple ended up buying Power Computing out and putting an end to the clone market. Well, if you can’t compete, use your financial muscle.
It’s often said that Apple bought the company – but it didn’t. Even Wikipedia gets this wrong, claiming that Power was an Apple subsidiary. In fact, what Apple bought was the Mac-related assets of Power, including the licence to make Mac clones. Apple did not acquire the company.
And, in fact, Power had a brief life post-Apple acquisition. It attempted to launch an Intel-based Windows laptop, the PowerTrip. However, it seems to have run out of money before it could launch – at least I can’t find any references to anyone ever getting their hands on the PowerTrip – and it got sued by its suppliers.
By the end of January 1998, Power was gone. Ironically, if the company had survived for longer, the $100m in Apple stock would have been worth a lot, lot more than Power itself ever was or could have been.
I’m sure that somewhere in a box, I still have some of their stickers.
Look, not everything about tech is about oligarchs, right? Apparently Microsoft is going to launch a smaller Surface Pro, and I, who love dinky little computers, am already looking for an excuse to have one.
When I left school in 1984, I knew two things with absolute certainty: I would never have a job, and I would most likely die young in a nuclear war.
It wasn't just me. This was the year of mass unemployment in the UK, as Thatcher broke British manufacturing into pieces suitable to be sold off to “foreign investors” while also breaking the power of the unions. And it was the time of the Cold War, which could — and nearly did — turn hot.
We're now back to grim times, but even in these moments there is hope. Kameron Hurley has written a lovely piece, reminding us of something that is easily forgotten: there have always been times like these. As she puts it:
Each generation has its moment to discover who it really is, and these times will test us to the utmost. We will find out who are friends and colleagues are at their very core, and it will shake us. But, as with every story of war and suffering and hope and despair, we will also discover who the heroes are.
2025-01-19 19:29:18
2025-01-19 01:19:51
I sometimes wonder about writing so much about politics when I am, at heart, a technology journalist. How did I get this way? Certainly, I have been radicalised by 14 years of Tories attempting to dismantle so many of the things which make Britain great. And, of course by Brexit, the biggest act of economic self-immolation in British history.
But there is more at work here because tech itself has become so central to our lives, cultures and economies that it is inevitably political. Tech forms the heart of mass communication and of the means of production in the 21st century, and if you know a little Marx and a little Gramsci, you will inevitably understand what that means.
Anyway, on to the (quite political) links.
There’s an old truism about the right that whatever they accuse others of, that’s what they do. But it’s also true of abuses of power. Whatever they accuse a government of doing, that’s what they plan to do when they have the power to do it.
So it’s not really a surprise that Mark Zuckerberg decided to kill off Meta’s diversity programmes not for a valid business reason, but because he was told by one of Trump’s creatures that the incoming president would “go to war” against DEI. This, of course, after Zuckerberg had publicly complained about “pressure” on his business from previous governments.
And this wasn’t just a small side conversation, or an example of anticipatory obedience: per the NYT report, “Mr. Zuckerberg’s political lieutenants previewed the changes to Mr. Miller in a private briefing” – the president’s representative was directly involved in the business affairs of a private company, approving their plans from a political perspective. Is the next step the “voluntary” sale of companies that don’t comply to people who will? I think you would be very naive to believe that couldn’t happen, based on what already has.
Tech companies bending the knee to Trump has, of course, left many people in the technology world in shock, and the question then becomes what to do about it. Quite a few people I know have, for example, dumped Meta platforms. But the problem with this is that it just doesn’t work when faced with a billionaire class that’s determined to get their way. As Cory Doctorow notes, "’voting with your wallet’" (is) a rigged ballot that's always won by the people with the thickest wallet.” And there’s no doubt that the likes of Zuckerberg, Bezos, and so on – knee-benders all – have the thickest wallets, and power and resources that can barely be imagined.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the New York Post – America’s lamest newspaper – should believe that checking facts is now a violation of free speech. I mean, why would telling the truth – the fundamental mission of all journalism – be anything else?
I think my headline is a better reflection of the situation. According to Bloomberg Trump has already prepared over 100 executive orders, but the one which will have Marc Andreessen fapping like a teenage boy will designate crypto as a national priority. This will “encourage” (in the same way Zuckerberg was encouraged) agencies to prioritise working with the crypto scam artists industry. Of course, this will mean increased costs to taxpayers, but it will mean increased profits to the people who bankrolled and supported Trump’s campaign. So that’s alright then.
You will, no doubt, have heard a lot about electric cars bursting into flames and a lot of it is nonsense. But one thing that isn’t is connected to the chemistry of lithium batteries: when they burn, they are really difficult to put out.
That’s proved to be a problem in the LA fires, where firefighters reported having to use a lot of water to put out fires in Tesla cars and Power Walls. Now, for once, this isn’t Tesla’s fault – even Elon Musk can’t be responsible for basic chemistry – but it does give us some pointers towards changing the way we design home batteries and deal with fires in the future.
Why does the US government want to ban TikTok? Yes, there is of course the general question of whether they want an application that’s on a lot of people’s phones to be controlled by the Chinese government. But the biggest question is around the use of TikTok as a propaganda tool. It’s not that the Chinese government would aimlessly promote pro-China views – that would be obvious, and stupid – but that it can gently move the needle, including suppressing anti-China views.
But here’s a thing: consider how Elon Musk is currently calling for the removal of the democratically elected government of the UK, while also breaking bread with German neo-Nazis. Wouldn’t the same principle that the US is using for TikTok also apply if Europe wanted to ban a propaganda platform which actively works against their interests? Sauce, goose, gander.
Elon Musk is not the world’s smartest man, but there is a strong case he might be the thinnest-skinned. Currently, he is in what the kids call “a beef” with several Twitch streamers who spotted that his claims about being a top-ten player of Path of Exile 2 might not hold water.
Let’s break this down: you are the richest man in the world. You want for nothing, and you will live in absolute luxury for the rest of your life. You have also influenced the election of the president, and have his ear. Power is yours.
So what do you do? You lie about your gaming abilities to impress a bunch of gamers, most of whom now think you’re a jerk because you faked it badly.
Pathetic.
The MacBook Air was so influential that it caused the entire industry to rethink their designs. Despite being underpowered, expensive, and having a spinning hard drive, its design was revolutionary and within a few years, almost every laptop resembled it. Even today, half the laptops on sale owe some of their design DNA to the MacBook Air.
Om Malik has written an eloquent piece about the Air and makes a comparison to the Vision Pro. Like the Air, the Vision Pro was far too expensive for ordinary people, but it’s also a pioneer of a sort. I can see Om’s point, but I’m not convinced that it will be as influential as the Air. There are already competitors around which, while not as advanced, are in the same mould. But either way, I loved my first Air. Maybe I would love a Vision Pro too?
Despite being a technology journalist for over thirty years, I have only ever once gone to CES. I spent a lot of that time covering the Mac, and Apple never really had a CES presence. The one time that I went, I really enjoyed it.
But one thing even a single visit taught me: there is an awful lot of crap at CES. You will see a lot of products, many of them bizarre, and some of them will never come to market. And now there is the worst in show awards, which highlight some of the… well… worst things you’ll see. Love it.
A little bit of a plug: As well as this blog, I also have a little linkblog on the old domain. Think of it as the unfiltered version of what you see here. And if you like, you can subscribe to a weekly summary of all my posts there. No ads, no charge, no tracking (that I know of).
2025-01-12 20:36:21
