FOIA Documents ‘Scrubbed’ From Intelligence Agency Website ⇥ bloomberg.com

A strange thing happened last May: the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s FOIA page, which had previously contained a generous list of released documents, was censored. When I asked the agency what was up with that, they told me the site was “currently under construction in order to enhance and streamline the user experience”, with “temporary downtime of certain pages and content”. It turns out that was nonsense, hence my use of “censored” above.

Jason Leopold, in his “FOIA Files” newsletter at Bloomberg:

But an ODNI official told FOIA Files that the removal of the FOIA page was not connected to the Tren de Aragua intelligence assessment released to Harper. Instead, the website overhaul was prompted after another agency flagged a document released during the Biden administration that the official claimed had been improperly posted to ODNI’s FOIA reading room. (The official would not describe the document or say if it was retroactively classified.)

The emails I obtained, which have been partially redacted, reference a “document,” the title of which was blacked out, that sparked ODNI’s aggressive response.

If there was a single erroneously released document, it surely would not necessitate the removal of so many documents. One of the few ones remaining in the reading room is, oddly enough, the partially redacted email exchange (PDF) released to Leopold in which Madeline Meeker asks for the page to be “completely scrubbed”. No request logs have been posted since January 2025 under the “most transparent administration in history”.

Dutch Broadcaster Confirms Identity of Someone Running an Alberta Separatist YouTube Channel ⇥ bnr.nl

Aäron Loupatty, BNR (in Dutch, as interpreted by Safari’s translation feature):

Because Canadian media have taken it out so big, Youp now says he is changing course. “This came out of nowhere for us. It is clear what it has brought about. If I had known earlier that this was a problem, I would have adjusted the content accordingly.’ Contrary to what the universities claim, Youp says there is no coordinated network that wants to fuel separatist sentiments in Alberta. According to him, many of the videos are created precisely because channels look away from each other, but there is no collaboration there.

“Youp” is Youp Licher, who was originally identified by CBC News. I have no reason to disbelieve him in claiming that this is simply a financial play, and not a deliberate effort to meddle in Alberta politics.

One of the YouTube channels in question — the Canadian Reporter — has accumulated around 15.5 million total video views since it was created on May 1 last year. Using an approximate number of 44,000 daily views with Social Blade’s earnings estimator suggests a range of USD $3,960–$63,360 in annual revenue from ads alone. That is a huge range, to be sure, but even the lowest number is a successful side hustle for how little work actually goes into this stuff.

More traditional media organizations — BNR and CBC News being two examples — attempted to separate the business side of what they do from the news side. Paying writers based on clicks used to be a noteworthy exception, but then traffic bonuses became part of the compensation package at some outlets. It eventually paved the way for the YouTube-native model of almost entirely traffic-based compensation. Historically powerful human gatekeepers have been replaced by the singular platform of YouTube, which means anyone can make money and possibly a living if they have a large enough audience. A fandom parlays into other revenue streams, of course; Canadian Reporter sells paid subscriptions on YouTube from $1.50–$10.50 per month, and has a “Buy Me a Coffee” link in the bio albeit with just two subscribers.

In the way this new economy has pushed out the old, it is unfortunately fitting that one of the inadvertent faces of one of these channels is Matt Berry. Berry made an audition tape without knowing how it was going to be used because he had a profile on freelance talent site Upwork. But Berry is no long-term freelancer. He was, until 2021, the award-winning music director at X92.9, Calgary’s alternative rock station. I cannot find any comment from the station’s owner as to why he was among those laid off at the time, but it feels a little on-the-nose that a former broadcaster found his likeness being used without permission to market some clickbait A.I.-generated videos and boost someone else’s AdSense revenue.

(Thank you to reader Sanel for sending me this link.)

Dutch YouTubers Behind Alberta Separatist Videos, Finds CBC News ⇥ cbc.ca

Eric Szeto, et al., CBC News:

CBC News identified three individuals in the Netherlands whose digital trail links them to accounts that hired actors to appear on the YouTube channels. Two of them attended the same online course that teaches customers how to create “faceless” YouTube channels that generate passive income for the creators, who remain in the shadows.

Turns out it was not a VPN connection after all.

Oracle Laid Off (Tens of?) Thousands of People in March ⇥ theregister.com

O’Ryan Johnson, reporting for the Register at the end of March:

Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners.

[…]

Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company’s workforce.

Hugh Langley and Ashley Stewart, Business Insider:

Employees started receiving notifications early Tuesday. The cuts appear to have affected employees globally, but the full extent of the layoffs could not be immediately learned.

“After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change,” copies of the notification email viewed by Business Insider stated. “As a result, today is your last working day.”

This is possibly tens of thousands of people whose lives have been upended after getting an email. They had plans. Since those layoffs, Larry Ellison’s net worth has grown by about $45 billion.

Meta Drops the Other Shoe, Announces Thousands of Layoffs for Next Month ⇥ ft.com

Hannah Murphy, Financial Times:

Meta will cut 10 per cent of its staff next month, or about 8,000 jobs, as the social media platform reduces its workforce to offset chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s AI spending spree.

[…]

Meta also said that it was no longer filling 6,000 positions that it had initially planned to hire for, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Not the 20% reported by Reuters last month, but a huge number nevertheless. This is in addition to a thousand people laid off in January and hundreds more in March. That is a lot of lives upended — a lot of people who relocated, made plans, bought houses, and made commitments they might no longer be able to fulfill — because Meta hired too aggressively, and is now running a “marvel of financial engineering” to build data centres.

The Disappearance of the Public Bench ⇥ placesjournal.org

Gabrielle Bruney, Places:

Benches aren’t just disappearing from large railroad stations, but also from subways, parks, plazas, sidewalks, and esplanades. Public transit systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, Anaheim, and New York City have lost benches, as have the entrance to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, a National Park plaza in Washington, D.C., a thoroughfare of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a boulevard dedicated to Korean veterans in Nashville, and a tiny riverfront park in Janesville, Wisconsin. Some of these seats were replaced with armatures for perching or leaning, but most were not. There is no firm data on how many benches have been removed in total, nor when the trend precisely started. But anecdotal evidence suggests that in the past decade, across the United States, hundreds of places to sit in public have quietly disappeared.

This is New York-centric and U.S.-heavy, but it is something I have also noticed around me, too. A bench is one of the few places you can sit and spend time for free. Their absence in so many public places is notable for what it says about who we consider part of the public.

Joanna Stern Launches ‘New Things’ ⇥ thenewthings.com

Joanna Stern left the Wall Street Journal and is going independent with her new thing called New Things, and I like this overarching editorial question:

But while writing my new book, I AM NOT A ROBOT — where I used AI in as many parts of my life as possible for a year — I realized Is this a good product? isn’t the main question to ask anymore. The bigger question is: Who is this tech for? Wall Street? Greedy CEOs? AI agents? Actual humans? I want it to be for humans. And I want to cover it that way too: as a human living with it, using it, testing it and trying to make sense of what it’s doing to our lives.

After all, tech is not really about products and services; it never has been. It is what they do for us and what they — or the companies that created them — expect of us.

The Online Spam Campaign to Support Alberta Separatism ⇥ thetyee.ca

Charles Rusnell, the Tyee:

A network of 20 inauthentic YouTube accounts has racked up nearly 40 million views by peddling lies, grievance, division and narratives normalizing the prospect of Alberta’s secession and annexation by the United States.

“Because these channels offer no identifying information to real humans or organizations, nor ties to the secession movement in Alberta, we are flagging this phenomenon as a potential covert influence operation produced by unknown actors pursuing unclear objectives,” states a report released today by the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.

The authors of the report “cannot confirm this network’s origin or intent, and the available evidence is inconclusive on both counts”, but it is notable to me that the official X accounts of two of the most-viewed channels, the “Canadian Reporter” and “David Fraser”, say they are either based in or connected via the Netherlands App Store. This seems to me like the product of a VPN, but it is notable they did not even mask their origin and pretend to be in Canada.

This sucks. Our province is such a political catastrophe that we are being exploited from — probably — abroad and close to home. It is unclear to me how much of an effect the YouTube network identified by these researchers would have; many of the channels have video view counts of well under a hundred. And even though a few of these channels appear to be taking off, they are surely eclipsed by a home-grown industry of people who seem to pump out daily videos broadcasting their conspiracy theories and separatist fairytales. I easily found a bunch of separatism-promoting channels — “Fight for Canada”, “PJ the Belt”, “John Bolton”, and “Igor Ryltsev” — each with millions of total lifetime video views. They are loud and probably a minority, but they are probably more likely to tilt a referendum, and that is frightening.

Breaking Up Is Hard for E.U. ⇥ politico.eu

Mathieu Pollet and Anouk Schlung, Politico:

Sensing a change in the air, Big Tech firms have wasted no time rolling out offerings meant to soothe — and cash in on — Europe’s unease.

Over the past year, U.S. hyperscalers have rushed to build products with EU-based governance structures and local operators, while doubling down on technical and legal safeguards. “Our industry, frankly, is doing a lot to address [the concerns] insofar as possible,” said Guido Lobrano, the director general for Europe of tech lobby ITI.

But critics have been dismissing their attempts as “sovereignty washing.” “Marketers realized it sells. Trump was a great salesman for this idea,” said Philippe Latombe, a centrist member of the French parliament.

The red alert push for digital sovereignty is really only about a year-and-a-half old, at most, and it is remarkable what E.U. countries have been able to achieve in that time. Yet it is a fraught and challenging operation, regardless. These big U.S.-based companies are deeply embedded into everything we do and a clean break was never going to be possible, in large part because it is not designed to be easy. That is not to say it is deliberately designed to be difficult — despite the consumer-level evidence offered by Amazon’s Prime cancellation procedure — only that there are few incentives to help users leave.

Meta Tells U.S. Staff It Is Going to Start Surveilling Their Every Digital Move for A.I. Training ⇥ reuters.com

Katie Paul and Jeff Horwitz, Reuters:

Meta is installing new tracking software on U.S.-based employees’ computers to capture mouse movements, clicks and ​keystrokes for use in training its artificial intelligence models, part of a broad initiative to build AI agents that can perform work tasks autonomously, the company told staffers in internal memos seen by Reuters.

If this were happening at any other company, it would be an alarming violation of workers’ expectations. But since it is Meta, I am sure employees, even those who are captive, will be reassured by the pinky promise limited scope in using this information.

That Was Tim, This Is Ternus ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from — for now.

The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him. The Chinese government was able to use that as leverage, and the tie-up became politically untenable in the United States, too. Cook’s precise supply chain management directly led to his appeasement of strongmen.

Tim Cook Is Stepping Down as Apple CEO in September, to Be Replaced by John Ternus ⇥ apple.com

With today’s news, we can settle a score. In November, four reporters for the Financial Times wrote that Apple was “stepping up its succession planning efforts, as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year”:

An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September, the people said.

Then, in his Bloomberg newsletter a week later, Mark Gurman reported:

[…] Based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined by the FT. Some people have speculated that the story was a “test balloon” orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change, but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false.

There are correct elements in both stories: the Times accurately reported that Apple was “preparing for its longtime leader to step down as early as next year”, while Gurman was ultimately right to claim Cook would not leave by midyear. Gurman also had the scoop that John Ternus was the CEO-in-waiting. But, in spirit, I would argue the Times story was more correct than Gurman’s response, which continued:

Yes, Apple will eventually have a new leader. And, yes, it’s probably Ternus. But unless there is some unexpected event that forces Cook to step down sooner than planned, that moment is not at hand. […]

While “as soon as next year” gives the paper a lot of room — anything can happen “as soon as next year” — its sources correctly assessed Tim Cook’s time as CEO was ending. And, despite Gurman responding to the report as though it were “imminent” event, the word does not appear once in the Times’ story. The Times was not running a “test balloon” and the story certainly was not false.

Grievance Poisoning in the First Degree ⇥ hamiltonnolan.com

Hamilton Nolan:

Anyhow, today, Palantir has gone mildly viral by posting on Twitter, “Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief.” Followed by 22 bullet points that sum up the book’s arguments. At last, a version of the book that tech people can read! The instant reaction to this bullet point list among non-tech people was “Wow, this is some fascist shit.” Which is true. But I want to make an even more rudimentary point that is, I think, a very important piece of context: This is not a coherent set of arguments at all. It is not a philosophy. It is not a set of intelligible ethics. Rather, it is a list of angry reactions to being yelled at — given a somber voice and dressed up as some sort of wondrous work of intellect.

One of the “popular highlights”, sourced from Kindle users, on the book’s Amazon page is the phrase “[t]he result is a culture in which those responsible for making our most consequential decisions — in any number of public domains, including government, industry, and academia — are often unsure of what their own beliefs are, or more fundamentally if they have any firm or authentic beliefs at all”. But does Karp or, by extension, Palantir?

The Wild Geese Chase ⇥ garbageday.email

Last week, Wired published a pretty terrible piece from John Semley, which was given the headline “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop”. It is purportedly an investigation into the way a particular marketing company manages to make its musician clients popular, but what it actually becomes is a puff piece for that marketing company, albeit accidentally.

Ryan Broderick:

The blowback against WIRED’s report has been pretty immense. McLamb had to put out a statement on X, writing “It’s important to me to say that I do not consider Geese to be a ‘psy-op’ and [told WIRED] as much.” Music critic Anthony Fantano wrote on X, “One of the most stupid, irresponsible, and vapid headlines/pieces I’ve read from wired. Shame.” And journalist Max Read wrote on Bluesky, “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.” Which is exactly the problem here.

The seemingly sudden popularity of Geese in the past year-ish is not that surprising because it was not actually that meteoric. The band was playing festivals five years ago; the record it released last year, “Getting Killed”, was the band’s fourth. To call it a “psyop”, as Wired’s headline writer decided, is so inaccurate it is basically a lie.

Adobe Has Rid Itself of Its Allies ⇥ petapixel.com

Jaron Schneider, PetaPixel:

Thirteen years ago, I sat in an amphitheater in Los Angeles as Adobe announced that it would be shifting from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. I remember being skeptical, but I was also willing to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt. After all, it created a beloved line of tools.

[…]

I was giving Adobe every benefit of the doubt, because I wanted to see this work. I think it’s important to recognize why I felt that way and what has changed in the last five years.

This follows the critical takes from Macworld and AppleInsider about Apple’s App Store policies as an industry voice pushing back on corporate behaviour. I have no idea if articles like these raise alarm bells for executives and decision-makers — but they should.

I have a quibble with Schneider’s article:

Adobe’s product is largely blameless. The product is, for the most part, not just good — it’s great. The promises Adobe made 13 years ago have been largely upheld from a product perspective. But it’s not enough to just make a good product, especially when you’re catering to artists.

I think Adobe has actually shipped worse products as a result of this strategy — and, for once, I will avoid making it all about bugs, of which there are many. Adobe’s applications are more capable than they ever have been, but they are also often worse for professionals in actual use as a direct result of the company’s software-as-a-service model. Nearly every application contains upsells or supposedly helpful alerts that are actually ads for other Adobe services. These promotions are particularly aggressive in pushing artificial intelligence tools. Even software as relatively simple as Acrobat cannot help but promote its ability to summarize a two-page document, and then suggest you store it with Adobe’s cloud service instead of sending it as an attachment.

This stuff gets in the way of professionals trying to do their job. Adobe was pressured into adding a “Quiet Mode” in Photoshop to hide most of these things, but not all of them, and only in Photoshop. It only underscores how much Adobe views its software as something it gives people permission to use, instead of tools it makes to help people get their work done.

AppleInsider Says Apple Sent It ‘Essentially the Same Email … 29 Times’ About App Store Scams in Ten Years ⇥ appleinsider.com

William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider:

After we reported less than four days ago about the fraudulent apps, Apple got back to us. They repeated the same talking points that they always do when an app gets pulled after it steals money from users, or some other nefarious deed.

And, as always, it’s information surrounding the issues that we are not allowed to quote, and not allowed to say who said it to us.

We have always adhered to those terms, even when others have not, or others were allowed to quote and gave a named Apple PR source. We did do an email search on the verbatim quotes we got in the last few days, looking for repetition over the last 10 years at AppleInsider on what they said to us.

Essentially the same email was sent to us 29 times over the last decade. The emails used verbatim quotes 17 times over that timespan.

Whether App Store scams are “getting far, far worse and more prevalent”, as Gallagher and Wuerthele claim without evidence, is immaterial to whether apps like Freecash and a fraudulent version of Ledger Live should have gotten past what Apple claims are a “thorough review” of “the highest standards for privacy, security, and content”. These specific apps needed to be caught; Freecash was caught by Wired months before Apple decided to remove it.

Gallagher and Wuerthele make some good arguments in this piece. Yet it also comes across as an admission that AppleInsider has done its part in its professional relationship with Apple. Its writers ran anonymous quotes, paraphrased key information delivered on background, and favouring Apple’s view or delivering it uncritically. I am not saying AppleInsider is shilling for Apple, but I do think, as an Apple-specific news site, there is a mutually beneficial relationship it recognizes to some extent. They get comments from the company’s selective communications staff and previews of embargoed reports. Perhaps this is a coincidental stance. I am glad it is recognizing it has been receiving the same carefully worded statement for years, at least.

Launching Strava With a Hotel Keycard ⇥ youtube.com

Tom Babin, of the excellent Shifter channel on YouTube, shared a very clever trick of using Shortcuts with an NFC chip — perhaps using a hotel keycard you forgot to return — to launch Strava or Komoot. I am terrible at remembering to track typical rides like my commute so I set this up and tucked the card into my wallet. Perhaps that will help.

Meta Must Face Youth Addiction Lawsuit by Massachusetts, Court Rules ⇥ reuters.com

Nate Raymond, Reuters

Meta Platforms must face a lawsuit ​by Massachusetts’ attorney general alleging the company designed its Instagram social media platform to addict children, the state’s top court ruled on Friday.

[…]

Writing for the unanimous court, Justice Dalila Argaez Wendlandt said ​the lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell does not seek to hold Meta liable for content created by its ​users — which Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 generally shields companies from — but targets the company’s conduct.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center:

In this case, as in many recent ones, the Court found that Section 230 does not prohibit claims alleging the companies designed their platforms harmfully and lied about their activities. Meta pushed its typical Section 230 test, claiming the law preempts any claim premised on Meta’s publishing activity. But the Court corrected Meta: Section 230 only applies to claims seeking to hold Meta liable for the harms springing directly from user-generated content they post. Meta’s design decisions, by contrast, are its own responsibility.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

This ignores a long list of precedents — and the explicit statements of Section 230’s authors — establishing that the law was designed to protect platforms from being sued over any editorial decision-making, including how content is presented. To put this in perspective, it’s like saying that someone could sue, say, the evening news based on where they placed a story (top of the show or bottom?) and that the impact of how it was presented is somehow unrelated to the content itself. That makes no sense. But it’s the way this court has interpreted 230.

Eric Goldman:

Even if this opinion doesn’t outright eliminate Section 230 in Massachusetts, it’s a sign of how 230 workarounds keep proliferating, contributing to the swiss cheese-ification of Section 230. When the bubbles in the swiss cheese become too large, the cheese wedge lacks structural integrity and falls apart. That is where 230 is heading, if it’s not already there.

Goldman is a lawyer and is worried about cases like these; the recent child safety cases in California and New Mexico also caused great concern.

To me, a non-lawyer, much of the actual text of the ruling (PDF) explaining why this lawsuit was not immediately turfed on Section 230 grounds seems pretty reasonable. For example, the judge says “[u]nder the default settings, Meta enables approximately forty types of notifications” for the Instagram app, which the government alleges “is designed to overwhelm young users and compel them repeatedly to reopen Instagram”. We can argue whether this is a meaningful thing for a government to police or if it is just another example of Meta resorting to tacky growth-hacking techniques instead of trusting their product is sufficiently compelling on its own. (Most days when I open Instagram in my browser, it puts a red badge over the notifications tab and suggests I have one new follower. I do not; I never have. It lies to me every time, presumably because it knows most people, including me, will usually click on that, thereby increasing a number on a dashboard somewhere.)

The government also raises issue with autoplay, infinite scrolling, live videos, and disappearing stories as potential vectors for harm. Whether this is true or false is immaterial to whether someone should have legal standing to make the argument in court. I, a non-lawyer, do not see why Section 230 should insulate companies from their product design choices simply because they occur on the internet. There is a tantalizing reference to Meta “deliberately manufacturing a delay between” a user refreshing their feed and new posts being displayed to, supposedly, heighten anticipation. Whether this is as described is something that can be scrutinized in court — but only if the government is allowed to make that case.

It entirely makes sense to me for a company like Meta to face no legal liability for the substance of a user’s post, like if an Instagram user baselessly accuses someone of a crime in a video they post. It is the person making that claim who should face legal consequences. But extending this legal moratorium to all facets of a platform containing user-generated material seems — as a non-lawyer with only a little bit of background knowledge — too far. I trust experts, but I am not following their logic that this would effectively repeal Section 230 and all the ways in which it has given birth to the modern web.

One thing is certain: given that many internet companies are headquartered in the United States, it is wild that a single ruling by a court in Massachusetts — a tiny state with a population of about seven million — could conceivably change the way the web works for just about everyone around the world.

Macworld: ‘Use Apple’s App Store at Your Own Risk’ ⇥ macworld.com

Reece Rogers, Wired, in January:

In the first month of 2026, Freecash has rocketed to popularity among US users. This week it reached the number two position on Apple’s free iOS download charts, nestled between ChatGPT and Gemini. The bump in downloads coincides with a spree of ads promoting the Freecash app.

[…]

While Freecash does actually pay out money to users, it’s not for scrolling social media. The app’s business model is centered around getting new users to play mobile games and then providing the players with monetary rewards. Those promises of direct payments to scroll aimlessly on TikTok sound too good to be true, because they are.

The app’s privacy policy also permits broad data collection as users install the ad-supported games it funnels them into.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, this week:

On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed).

Oliver Knight, CoinDesk:

A fake version of Ledger Live distributed via Apple’s App Store has been linked to at least $9.5 million in crypto theft, with victims now coming forward describing devastating losses, including entire retirement funds wiped out “in an instant.”

One victim, posting on X under the handle @glove, said he lost 5.9 BTC – his entire savings accumulated over a decade – after downloading what he believed was the official Ledger app while setting up a new computer.

That is not “glove”; it is “G. Love”, of G. Love and Special Sauce fame.

David Price, Macworld:

There are two facts which unite these two apps. First, Apple allowed them on to the App Store when it absolutely should not have done. Second, when problems emerged, it let them stay there longer than it had any business doing. And these raise major concerns about the way the App Store is run, and the rationale behind Apple’s stewardship of the market for apps on its products.

Apple also left Grok and X on the App Store even after it was turned into a factory for abusive images. In a January letter to three U.S. Senators, Apple said xAI’s first attempt at fixing this problem was insufficient, and required it make more extensive changes or the apps would be removed from the App Store, according to David Ingram of NBC News. (I should stress that this article is hard paywalled, but the audio player at the top has an A.I. voice readout of its full text. My interpretation is based on that.)

Price calls the App Store “rotten” — is there any other word? — and says Apple should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue” if it cannot effectively police its wares. I imagine Apple would argue it enforces its rules all the time and sometimes things just get through.

But that kind of response only reveals the scale of the store and, consequently, the problem: nobody can effectively govern this many items, especially when they are all user-submitted. Walmart has a few hundred thousand individual products, while Costco has about four thousand and says most supermarkets have in the range of tens of thousands. The App Store is ungovernable at this size, and high-profile incidents like the ones above only reinforce that sentiment.

Live Nation Is an Illegal Monopoly, Jury Finds ⇥ bbc.com

Alanna Durkin Richer and Larry Neumeister, reporting for the Associated Press last month:

The Justice Department touted a tentative settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster and parent company Live Nation Entertainment on Monday as a victory for consumers that would end an illegal monopoly over live events in America, but over two dozen states planned to keep fighting the companies in court.

Noah Shachtman, writing for the New York Times:

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly Live Nation controls the live music business and how directly that control hurts fans. Let’s say you were one of the thousands of people who went to see Megan Thee Stallion’s most recent show in Charlotte, N.C. Some fees went to Ticketmaster, which Live Nation owns. Some of the purchase price went to the venue, then called the PNC Music Pavilion, which is operated by Live Nation. Some went to the tour’s promoter: Live Nation again. Another slice went to Megan and her team, which includes her managers, who work at a company co-owned by, you guessed it, Live Nation.

Competitors charge high fees, too, but Live Nation is different because of its vertical integration. The company “offers every service in the chain,” Judge Subramanian noted, “save — for now, perhaps — the job of the artists themselves.”

Archie Mitchell and Kali Hays, BBC News:

Live Nation, the entertainment giant which owns Ticketmaster, has been illegally operating as a monopoly and overcharging fans, a federal jury has found.

The verdict followed four days of deliberations in a seven-week trial in New York City that could have a major impact on the music industry.

The concert venue and music festival owner could be forced to divest parts of its business or even split from Ticketmaster, an outcome former Attorney General Merrick Garland called for when he filed the lawsuit in May 2024.

The U.S. Department of Justice debased itself with last month’s settlement, personally requested by the expert dealmaker himself, and this verdict seals how embarrassing it was. It was bananas that governments worldwide permitted the acquisition of Ticketmaster by Live Nation in the first place, let alone all the other parts of the entertainment and event industry controlled by this single company. Break it into little pieces.