Michael Tsai: I don’t think the problem is really Tim Cook or whoever at Apple made the ICEBlock decision last week. The current situation is just the symptom of a decision made long ago: for Apple to be a choke point for app distribution. If your solution to government overreach is to depend on the […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Thorin Klosowski, Techdirt: The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Elina Eickstädt, Chaos Computer Club: Just a quick reminder: Client-side scanning is not only error-prone nonsense, but would also be illegal from the outset. This […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Dean Jackson, Tech Policy Press: The Trump administration’s ambitions have little to do with safeguarding free expression from tyranny. If they did, the administration would not be searching for cherry-picked examples of content removed under the DSA. Instead, they are using tech policy at the State Department as a tool in their project to reshape […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Yes, it is 2025, but Sam Henri Gold decided to pick apart the changes between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1, which changed the number of bars shown in moderate-to-low reception areas: The actual calculation is dead simple. When converting signal strength to bars, CommCenter loads each threshold from memory and compares until it finds the […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
In January 2023, Cory Doctorow described the way social media evolves, eventually broadening the theory and giving it the name “enshittification”: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Corbin Smith, Defector (gift link): Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Under Armour: These companies do not actually spin thread, tan leather, vulcanize rubber, or even put together the shoe. They design prototypes of a product and then facilitate all the actions necessary to make money off it. They pressure supplies and manufacturers at every level of […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them. Jeff Johnson, quoting me: “So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good” This *should* be […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Lynn Hunt, in a 2010 essay for Perspectives on History: […] You cannot accumulate pages if you constantly second guess yourself. You have to second guess yourself just enough to make constant revision productive and not debilitating. You have to believe that clarity is going to come, not all at once, and certainly not before […]| pxlnv.com
Dan Mangan, CNBC: Google on Friday joined Apple in removing from its online store apps that can be used to anonymously report sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other law-enforcement authorities. Apple on Thursday night said it was removing ICEBlock and other similar apps from its App Store that are used to […]| pxlnv.com
Adam Engst, TidBits, had some very kind things to say about my Liquid Glass piece, which I do appreciate. I liked Engst’s attempt to answer the question of “why?”: Why now? The answer may partly lie in available processing power. The balance between usability and aesthetics has always been informed by technical capabilities. Consider a […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Jason Koebler and Jules Roscoe, 404 Media: To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw, Financial Times: The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users’ data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant’s encryption. […] Apple made a complaint to the […]| pxlnv.com
Robert Graham, clarifying the bad reporting of the big SIM farm bust in New York: The Secret Service is lying to the press. They know it’s just a normal criminal SIM farm and are hyping it into some sort of national security or espionage threat. We know this because they are using the correct technical […]| pxlnv.com
Something I missed in posting about Apple’s critical appraisal of the Digital Markets Act is its timing. Why now? Well, it turns out the European Commission sought feedback beginning in July, and with a deadline of just before midnight on 24 September. That is why it published that statement, and why Google did the same. […]| pxlnv.com
In 2023 Lina Khan, then-chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, sued Amazon over using (PDF) “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions” and “knowingly complicat[ing] the cancellation process”. Some people thought this case was a long-shot, or attempted to use Khan’s scholarship […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Catharine Tunney, CBC News: The immensely popular social media app TikTok has been collecting sensitive information from hundreds of thousands of Canadians under 13 years old, a joint investigation by privacy authorities found. […] The privacy commissioners said TikTok agreed to enhance its age verification and provide up-front notices about its wide-ranging collection of data. […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Apple issued a press release criticizing the E.U.’s Digital Markets Act in a curious mix of countries. It published it on its European sites — of course — and in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, all English-speaking. It also issued the same press release in Brazil, China, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, and Thailand — […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Oscar Godsell, Sky News: The opposition’s shadow finance minister James Paterson has since urged the Australian Labor government to follow suit. Mr Paterson told Sky News if the US was able to create a “safer version” of TikTok, then Australia should liaise with the Trump administration to become part of that solution. “It would be […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Do you manage a Patreon page as a “creator”? I do; it is where you can give me five dollars per month to add to my guilt over not finishing my thoughts about Liquid Glass.1 You do not have to give me five dollars. I feel guilty enough as it is. Anyway, you might have […]⌥ Permalink| Pixel Envy
Craig Grannell, Wired: Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally […]| pxlnv.com
Tim Hardwick, MacRumors: Apple says on its feature availability webpage that “Apple Intelligence: Live Translation with AirPods” won’t be available if both the user is physically in the EU and their Apple Account region is in the EU. Apple doesn’t give a reason for the restriction, but legal and regulatory pressures seem the most plausible […]| pxlnv.com
Thomas Germain, BBC News, covered the Pew report about the relationship between Google’s A.I. Overviews and click-through traffic: Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” [Pew’s Aaron] Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% […]| pxlnv.com
Vjosa Isai, New York Times: Some of the most popular bike lanes were making Toronto’s notorious traffic worse, according to the provincial government. So Doug Ford, Ontario’s premier, passed a law to rip out 14 miles of the lanes from three major streets that serve the core of the city. Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, arrived […]| pxlnv.com
Natasha Tiku, Washington Post: Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will “pay the price” for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post. The messages the […]| pxlnv.com
Mike Masnick, Techdirt, reacting to Grok’s Nazi turn: We need to take back control over the tools that we use. Especially these days, as so many people have started (dangerously) treating AI tools as “objective” sources of truth, people need to understand that they are all subject to biases. Some of these biases are in […]| pxlnv.com
Apple: The European Commission has required Apple to make a series of additional changes under the Digital Markets Act: […] The wording of this sentence makes it sound like the list of specific policies following it were dictated by the European Commission, but I am not sure that is true. John Voorhees, MacStories: Fees have changed for […]| pxlnv.com
Michael Tsai, commenting in relation to the “tyranny of apps” article: I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app. I agree, but I think it is a worse situation than that suggests. Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, […]| pxlnv.com
Jason Koebler, 404 Media: Meta deleted nonbinary and trans themes for its Messenger app this week, around the same time that the company announced it would change its rules to allow users to declare that LGBTQ+ people are “mentally ill,” 404 Media has learned. […] The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows these posts [announcing the […]| pxlnv.com
Zoe Kleinman, Liv McMahon, and Natalie Sherman, BBC News: “Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding that receiving the summaries is optional. “A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text […]| pxlnv.com
Matthew Green on Bluesky: I love that Apple is trying to do privacy-related services, but this [“Enhanced Visual Search” setting] just appeared at the bottom of my Settings screen over the holiday break when I wasn’t paying attention. It sends data about my private photos to Apple. The first mention of this preference I can […]| pxlnv.com
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration and Sam Reich’s dad, wrote about Elon Musk’s political influence in an editorial for the Guardian. It begins as a decent piece, comparing the power of owning a social media platform with Musk’s childlike gullibility — my words, not Reich’s. But, in a section […]| pxlnv.com
An un-bylined report in Le Monde: French judicial authorities on Sunday extended the detention of the Russian-born founder and chief of Telegram Pavel Durov after his arrest at a Paris airport over alleged offenses related to the popular but controversial messaging app. I believe it is best to wait until there is a full description […]| pxlnv.com