The Verge Liveblogged a Technical Q&A With Craig Federighi and Others ⇥ theverge.com

Victoria Song and Nilay Patel, the Verge:

Fresh off the WWDC keynote presentation, The Verge has been invited to an “on-the-record technical deep dive into the bold new architecture enabling Apple Intelligence capabilities.” Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi and his team will be there, and so will we.

No video, but it looks like there was a presentation and a few live demos totalling about forty minutes, then about nine minutes responding — sort of — to pre-submitted press questions. Apple has not returned to live presentations, but this press Q&A and the carefully shot presentation demos are clearly a deliberate way of avoiding questions about whether any of this stuff is real. Once bitten.

Alberta Separatism and Monetized ‘Content’ on Social Media ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, Jordan Pearson, and Christian Paas-Lang, CBC News:

You might think, based on the volume of her Facebook posts, that Nieta Aqila is an Albertan who supports separation.

“I signed the Alberta independence petition” because “Canada is not a great country anymore,” an account in her name wrote in a popular Facebook group called Alberta Independence that promotes the movement and has more than 100,000 members.

[…]

But the account owner, according to a CBC visual investigation, was posing as a Canadian and is actually a noodle merchant and content creator from Indonesia, who in some cases was just stealing content from real Albertans.

You might remember the Dutch YouTube channels running a similar playbook: find controversial and newsmaking topics, generate material, and rake in a cut of the ad revenue. In purely financial terms, it is not a bad gig, particularly for this person who lives in a region where minimum wage is about USD $220 per month. An extra USD $14 per month from Facebook, which is what they reported earning in April, can be meaningful. (A screenshot in this article shows a much lower take in previous months.)

The flattening of media into “content” is partly to blame for why this stuff can happen. It appears to get little attention as-is, but it would get none at all without the samey generic framing created by Facebook and YouTube. It is also unlikely a random person in Indonesia or the Netherlands would want to make these kinds of posts without the monetization programs provided by these platforms.

Small OS27 Details From WWDC ⇥ macstories.net

Today’s live stream was a little over an hour long — the shortest presentation since 2005 — but, if this big list of refinements captured by Jonathan Reed, of MacStories, is representative of what will be shipping in September, I am not disappointed. Some choice bullet points, in no particular order:

  • Uniform toolbars

  • [iOS] Lock Screen consistently stays awake while scrolling notifications

  • More distinct active windows [in MacOS]

  • Search for photos and videos using additional metadata

These are a few things I have previously complained about or filed feedbacks against. Plus, there are a whole lot of things that begin with the words “faster” or “more reliable”. I would like to see this every year, of course, but this appears to be a long-overdue correction.

One more thing I would like to highlight:

  • New keyboards for Indigenous languages including Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Kiowa, and Tsuu’tina

For about ten years, third-party keyboards from an app called FirstVoices have provided support for these and other Indigenous languages, and it is encouraging to see first-party attention, too, for languages at risk of extinction. While there are around 2,500 people living in Tsuut’ina Nation, located adjacent to Calgary, the Tsuut’ina language is spoken by only about 150 people as of 2021 thanks to a history of concerted efforts by colonial powers to stamp it out.

Update: It is disappointing that MacOS 26 is the last version supported on Intel Macs, meaning there are a bunch of people who updated to the slow and janky version of MacOS who will not receive any of the speed, stability, or performance improvements coming in MacOS 27. This is a little like a Mac OS X Snow Leopard year all over again. That version dropped support for PowerPC Macs and was only available for Intel models. Perhaps dropping legacy support is one reason for these refinements.

Meta Says A.I.-assisted Account Hijackings Began in April ⇥ this.weekinsecurity.com

Zack Whittaker, This Week in Security:

According to the data breach notice filed with Maine’s attorney general’s office late on Friday, Meta notified at least 20,225 people that their accounts had been compromised, including 30 people in Maine.

[…]

According to Maine’s listing, the hacks began around April 17 and lasted until this week, when Meta said that it had secured the chatbot. Instagram reportedly started notifying affected individuals earlier this week by sending a password reset notification, even as some reported that the hacks were ongoing.

It got worse again. That is a large number of accounts but, more notable to me, a long duration for this vulnerability to be live, from less than a month after the A.I. support bot launched until last week.

Meta Removes Code It Added to Support Facial Recognition Feature That ‘Does Not Exist’ ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.

Once again, the pugilistic but ultimately cowardly Meta communications team had no comment of substance for what is, despite their public protest, a worrisome feature that is clearly moving through development.

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Sanctioned Russian Bank VTB Sneaked an App Into the App Store ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

But on Friday morning, a random productivity app called Cириус broke into the top three.

[…]

The reality seems to be that the app is a Russian banking app disguised as a Pomodoro timer. Activity on Telegram this week points to the app actually being a client for Russian financial institution VTB Bank.

The link on “VTB Bank” goes to Wikipedia instead of VTB’s website, where the first tab on the home page slider is currently advertising this app. (Update: It has since been removed.) It is barely disguised. In Russian media, the developer says there are other apps lined up to take the place of this one after it is inevitably removed. Apple and Google have repeatedly failed to catch apps violating U.S. sanctions.

Hall:

The app will almost certainly be pulled soon, but it’s always surprising that existing systems in place sometimes miss detecting apps disguised like this.

I suppose the App Store review process could always be worse, but it is no longer surprising that its team, too focused elsewhere, does not catch egregious rule-breakers.

Documents Show Social Media Companies Specifically Marketed to Schoolchildren ⇥ nytimes.com

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, New York Times:

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

[…]

The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.

I do not think it will be surprising to many readers that these companies had strategies to increase usage by children, even during school hours, but I do think it is notable to see it spelled out in these documents. The popularity of these apps is not organic or foretold; it is, at least to some extent, created. There is no reason why Meta would need Instagram “ambassadors” at schools (PDF) to “drive product adoption” if it were not trying to increase Instagram use among teenagers.

Valentino-DeVries:

Members of the company’s [Google’s] education department were often excited about products they thought could improve learning, such as affordable laptops and educational YouTube videos, according to court documents and interviews. They worked alongside product managers, however, who were focused on a different upside: increasing YouTube’s viewership.

YouTube is maybe the trickiest of all these platforms to govern within schools because it has no alternative. There is a vast library of genuinely educational and informative video on the site, and then there is the rest of YouTube. It therefore makes sense to allow its use among students and within schools. However, YouTube has also been honed for boosting engagement, something which affects all users. That is not to say we should have exactly the same standards for children and adults, but it highlights the difficulty of using a singular platform with general-market financial incentives in an educational setting.

Not-Yet-Enabled Code Added to Meta A.I. App for Glasses-Based Facial Recognition Feature ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software.

[…]

Three AI models powering NameTag have already been deployed from Meta’s servers and now reside on its customers’ phones, according to WIRED’s analysis, which was independently reproduced by outside experts. One model detects faces, one crops them, and a third encodes them into biometric data.

Facial recognition, as Mehrotra and Cameron repeatedly note, is not yet enabled. But according to an Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher who tried the existing code, it appears to be partly functional.

Meta communications troll Andy Stone is really mad about this story and, on X, even claimed the “feature doesn’t exist” (Xcancel). Last time I spilled water across my keyboard, I was just happy my laptop still worked properly, but it seems that in Meta’s case, it resulted in writing an entire facial recognition feature and pushed it to production. Incredible stuff.

The New York Times reported on Meta’s rollout strategy for the feature earlier this year (previously linked), while Ryan Mac, then at Buzzfeed News, wrote in 2021 that Andrew Bosworth said facial recognition in smart glasses was something the company was exploring. On X, Bosworth built upon Stone’s reply (Xcancel) to this article claiming it is “incredibly misleading” and “dishonest”, for no particular reason.

Some companies are irredeemably bad and rotten to the core. The sooner Meta runs out of money and closes up shop, the better the world will be.

See Also: Buchodi’s technical breakdown.

Office 2019 for Mac Goes Read-Only in July ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

If you are still using Microsoft Office 2019 for Mac, it will stop working fully on 13 July 2026. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will enter “reduced functionality mode” — a euphemism meaning you can view and print documents but cannot edit, save, or create new ones. Microsoft’s documentation doesn’t clarify what this means for Outlook users.

Why is this happening? A certificate expiration is forcing Office 2019 into read-only mode, though Microsoft acknowledges this only obliquely in the FAQ. Without a current certificate, the apps can’t confirm you have a legitimate license.

Engst compares Microsoft’s approach to Apple’s when it issued an update earlier this year for decade-old iPhones, with a new certificate that allows iMessage and FaceTime to keep functioning. While Apple’s approach is welcome, it is also a good reminder why this proprietary service should always be paired with support for open standards like SMS and RCS.

Michael Tsai:

[…] The customer did their part by paying; it was the company that chose to impose the activation model in order to weed out cheaters; shouldn’t it then own any problems that creates?

But it’s actually worse than that because even subscribing to Office 365 doesn’t fix the problem. You need a newer version of Office, which necessitates a newer version of macOS, which may necessitate getting a new Mac — all to fix what seems like an artificial problem.

My workday began with a notification from Teams that the desktop app will stop working on 20 July, as Microsoft says it is only compatible with the three most recent versions of MacOS. The oldest supported version, therefore, is MacOS Sonoma and, given Apple’s own support policy, that means only Macs released in the past eight years or so are supported. Even though many Macs from that era remain capable and fast, eight years is a long time, and Teams remains available through a web browser.

Also today, OneDrive automatically updated to a newer version, which is incompatible with the version of MacOS I am running. I received no warning until I tried launching it. Microsoft provides no support for this kind of problem for end users but, luckily, I had a Time Machine backup I could use. However, I realized OneDrive would probably automatically update and I would have to do all this all over again, and it contains no relevant preferences. So I needed to delete the related files in /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons and then, thanks to a tip from Sébastien Marchal, block the updater domain in my /etc/hosts file.

The software Microsoft makes is often the kind of thing people are required to use for their job. We do not have a choice of whether to have it installed. It would be nice if Microsoft cared just a little bit more about the durability of what it ships.

Powerful A.I. Super PACs Duel Over U.S. Midterm Elections ⇥ nytimes.com

Theodore Schleifer, New York Times (gift link):

The bad blood between the super PACs comes as powerful Silicon Valley companies race to shape the future of A.I. regulation. The groups are two of the biggest spenders in this year’s midterm elections, laying out nearly $24 million and promising that over $100 million more is on the way.

Their financial duel is effectively a proxy war between two of the biggest A.I. companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. One super PAC, Public First, is allied with Anthropic, while the other, Leading the Future, is aligned with OpenAI.

If those names sound familiar to you, it could be because I covered this topic last month. Schleifer’s story is, of course, far more in-depth and better-sourced — and, as an outsider, it is a story that does not leave me feeling particularly confident in the A.I. policy prospects in the world’s most powerful country.

The amount of money A.I. companies have on hand is truly staggering. Of course all of them are spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the results of a midterm election, just like how Formula 1 teams, which used to be plastered in cryptocurrency ads, are now covered in logos for A.I. companies. It is only going to get worse.

OpenAI posted a response to its website claiming it has “not made donations to any super PACs”. This appears to be technically true, though not meaningfully so, as Leading the Future is funded by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and its founding was encouraged by OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. OpenAI says “any engagement with that organization has been in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company”, but the distinction between personal and business involvement seems wafer-thin when it comes to executives and super PACs reflecting the interests of the company they run.

The Meta A.I.-Powered Instagram Account Takeover Problem Gets Worse ⇥ techcrunch.com

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

The widespread hacking campaign that relied on simply asking Meta AI’s chatbot to take over a victim’s Instagram account appears to have continued even after the company said the issue had been resolved. Meanwhile, the company has been scrambling to secure the targeted accounts and alert victims.

It is not very often for there to be an update on a security incident where it is less severe than originally reported, and I cannot remember a time when Meta has ever been able to provide such welcome news. And it is not as though this is some obscure or difficult-to-use way to hijack an account. If Meta has communicated to users any steps they can take to reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim, I have not received it.

Bill Gates’s Carefully Manicured Image Is Cracking ⇥ wsj.com

Emily Glazer, Wall Street Journal:

His [Bill Gates’] carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view, challenging prior efforts by the 70-year-old to downplay his relationship with the sex offender. In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.

[…]

Two different polling teams — at the Gates Foundation, and his private office, Gates Ventures — for years have closely tracked opinions about Gates, including on favorability, trustworthiness and inspiration. A media analysis prepared for the Gates Foundation found that there had been a more than 40% increase in “critical news narratives” about Gates and the foundation since the Epstein files were released through February, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

There are so many little details in this story that are worth your time, but my big takeaway — aside from the Epstein stuff — is the neurotic obsession with building image that, I imagine, is fairly common among public figures. I know this, of course; you probably do, too. But to see it spelled out in the way Glazer does is quite something.

Gates pays people to obsess over his public perception for him — to choose his clothes, to work with Netflix on documentary-style vehicles for him, and to massage his blog and social media accounts. There is something truly bizarre about having a team edit together a video of a rich businessman going for pizza in an attempt to make him relatable and likeable, and then — presumably — tracking the performance of that Instagram post.

Gates and his foundation have done undeniable good in the world, while also being a figurehead of the mixed results of billionaire philanthropy. Also, he spent a lot of time around Epstein. It remains a mystery to me why billionaires like him also want to become beloved celebrity intellectual figures.

Meta A.I. Support Bot Meets Robert Hackerman, the County Password Inspector ⇥ krebsonsecurity.com

Brian Krebs:

A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target’s usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta’s AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset.

Meta, a trillion-dollar corporation, should probably hire a few more people who have read the SMBC comic.

Meta Legal Action Forces Sarah Wynn-Williams to Sit Onstage in Silence ⇥ theguardian.com

Emma Loffhagen, the Guardian:

[Sarah] Wynn-Williams, whose bestselling memoir, Careless People, details her years working at Facebook, was due to appear in conversation with the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr and academic Tim Wu.

Instead, Wynn-Williams sat on stage for the duration of the hour-long discussion between Cadwalladr and Wu, without speaking or responding. She was unable even to nod or shake her head.

To be sure, Wynn-Williams’ silent appearance onstage is the kind of thing that would encourage press coverage and, presumably, this publicity could encourage book sales. Yet Meta has, for a full year now, insisted that “Careless People” is just a bunch of old anecdotes; pay no mind, there is nothing to see here. But its lawyers are vigorously enforcing the arbitration order (PDF) preventing her from making public remarks about Meta that could be construed as critical or negative.

I am no media relations expert, but I bet “Careless People” would feel much less potent if Meta realized it is a trillion-dollar corporation with a crappy reputation regardless of one ex-employee’s book, and with shareholders who do not care about what she wrote so long as the ads keep selling.

The Effects of Another Ad in iOS App Store Search ⇥ blog.thinktapwork.com

Jeremy Provost of development firm Think Tap Work:

It’s been 64 days since we first noticed Apple’s second ad position in search results for iPhone and iPad. Our update after two weeks showed consistently less search ad impressions for our apps, unless we invested heavily in paying for Search Ads.

Here are some updated numbers. Just like last time, these numbers only include App Store Search impressions from iOS devices. As you’ll see, these numbers get harder and harder to compare over time.

Chris Lindsay, developer of Nihongo, a Japanese dictionary app:

Before the rollout, my organic and paid downloads had remained pretty steady for most of the last year. After the rollout, my my organic installs dropped, and my paid installs rose. My overall downloads actually stayed roughly flat, but a large chunk of what used to be organic downloads appears to have shifted into paid downloads instead:

The ads themselves still work well. The problem is that many of these paid downloads seem to be users I previously would have acquired organically.

These ads are effectively another surcharge Apple has foisted upon developers for the privilege of distributing software to my iPhone and yours. Far from being premium “curated” experience, the App Store is this way because Apple has every incentive to steadily make it a little bit worse for users and developers — because where else are you going to go for your iPhone apps?

Checking in on Some Pro-Hate-Speech Social Networks ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

The Agence France-Presse reporting on the U.S. president’s social-media-and-cryptocurrency-and-maybe-nuclear-fusion operation:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) reported revenue of less than US$1 million for the three months ending March 31, according to a company filing.

Under $4 million in annual revenue is less than how much Twitter was earning in 2009 — unadjusted for inflation — an amount Steven Levy described as “modest”.

Speaking of Twitter, let us check in on SpaceX which, after a series of totally normal business deals, now owns the company and is preparing to trade publicly. Mike Masnick, of Techdirt:

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion [in Twitter/X revenue] by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. […]

Earlier this year, a judge found against Elon Musk in a lawsuit filed by X against advertisers claiming they staged an illegal boycott.

The SpaceX prospectus, by the way, is one of the funniest documents to ever live on the sec.gov domain. It is lucky the business it is known for is so damn photogenic because it is, at present, a profitable satellite internet provider with side businesses of space exploration and artificial intelligence that each lose money. (How it internally accounts for the cost of sending Starlink satellites into orbit is a fantastic question.) And the present business model of the latter is something Patrick Boyle described as “renting GPUs to a competitor on terms that can vanish in a fiscal quarter”. Yet the company still claims the size of its total addressable market is over $28 trillion, or over one-fifth of the entire world’s GDP.

Even so, a $1.75–2 trillion valuation is plausible simply because of Musk. Similarly, and back to that AFP article:

According to its filing, TMTG generated US$900,000 in revenue during the first quarter, a paltry amount for a company valued at US$2.47 billion on the stock market.

That valuation is not much; at time of writing, it is worth about as much as Central Garden & Pet, owners of Nylabone and McKenzie plant seeds. That company last quarter posted revenues one thousand times greater than TMTG, with profit margins of over 12%. Nevertheless, TMTG has a connection to the U.S. president, so it is similarly valued. Lots of good, normal stuff happening in the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

Iris, a Photo History Explorer ⇥ irisphotos.app

Tyler Hall (finally) released Iris, and it is excellent:

And somewhere along the way the whole emotional center of the thing shifted. I set out to build an anti-Photos utility — a search engine for a hard drive. What I actually ended up with is a memory keeper. Open a photo today and Iris tells you the date, surfaces “16 items on this day,” drops a pin on the map, and lists the people in the frame with their ages quietly calculated from their birthdays. That is not a utility. That is the opposite of anti-anything.

I have been testing Iris for a couple of months and I think it is delightful. It reads all the photo libraries you point it at — your system library, whether that is in iCloud or local, and any folders you want like the one that contains your Lightroom edits, for example — and makes them accessible in a single, giant view.

But that is not the coolest part. No, that is that it lets you explore your tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of photos in a way that treats each of them as little memory boxes. So often, it is not just a picture of your kid, or your dog, or your dinner; it is a time you would like to remember. There are a bunch of things in each file that can bring you back to that moment. Photos does a poor job of that; Iris, on the other hand, is made for exactly that, something Hall takes seriously. How many apps are there with a manifesto?

Iris is great, old-school, indie Mac software.

Last.fm Announces It Has Gone Independent ⇥ support.last.fm

After nearly twenty years under CBS ownership, Last.fm is once again independent:

Your account, your listening history, and your data remain exactly where they are. The team building Last.fm is the same. The service continues as normal.

It is difficult to know whether it is riskier for Last.fm to be independent or under the banner of the hilariously corrupt Paramount Skydance conglomerate, but I imagine it would not — uh — last long if the leadership of the latter continues making cuts. I am happy to be a paying subscriber to a service I care about, and am excited to learn what comes next.

The Mythical App Store Reviewer Month ⇥ lapcatsoftware.com

Jeff Johnson:

I’d like to make an analogy between software development and Apple App Store review. A common, cursory reaction to the obvious failures of app review, the continual appearance of countless scams in the App Store, is to suggest that Apple hire more reviewers. My contention is that adding reviewers is not a solution to the problem of App Store curation, and the belief in such a solution is a myth. I don’t claim that hiring more reviewers would make app review slower. Rather, I think that meaningful, effective curation can’t be measured simply by the amount of available labor, much like [Fred] Brooks argues that the possibility of measuring useful work in units of time, man-months, is a myth.

Apple markets the App Store as a “curated storefront”, but that is not meaningfully true if it is serving up, as Apple says, about two million apps. Meanwhile, as Johnson writes, “nobody worries about scams in Apple Arcade […] a truly curated service”.

The thing is that Apple’s App Store should have a carefully selected inventory of apps. That is Apple’s whole brand: premium, highly-desirable products, and people are willing to pay a little more. The App Store does not match that promise. I think the direction of regulatory and court decisions on the governance of iOS app distribution could be a gift for more selective curation, the kind of thing for which some third-party developers would want to pay extra compared to the competing third-party app marketplaces that would also be available.

Alas, we are on the cusp of another WWDC during which Apple seems unlikely to make major changes to software distribution across its many “post-P.C.” platforms.