Brazil Antitrust Body Rules Apple Must Permit External Payment Methods in iOS Apps ⇥ reuters.com

Andre Romani and Alberto Alerigi Jr., Reuters:

Brazilian antitrust regulator Cade said on Monday that Apple must lift restrictions on payment methods for in-app purchases, among other things, as the watchdog moved to proceed with an investigation into a complaint filed by Latin America e-commerce giant MercadoLibre.

It would look very silly to me if Apple continues to deal with these consistent findings in country after country after country after country in individualized ways instead of updating its rules globally. Very silly, indeed.

How Sports Betting Has Changed the U.S. ⇥ rollingstone.com

David Hill, Rolling Stone:

PASPA, which stands for the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, was a law in the U.S. that prohibited sports betting, except in a few states, like Nevada. It was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018, and ever since, sports gambling has exploded into the American zeitgeist. Ads for sportsbooks have dominated televised events, made their way into the stadiums and arenas of professional and collegiate sports alike, and even onto the jerseys of the athletes themselves. Talk of point spreads and totals, once taboo over the airwaves, are now not only common topics among the sports commentariat, but also displayed in the chyron scoreboards right on the screen. It seems like everyone who isn’t betting on sports likely has someone in their life who is. Revenues for sports-betting companies reached nearly $11 billion in 2023, up 44.5 percent from the year before.

[…]

According to NCPG, 16 percent of sports bettors meet the criteria for clinical gambling disorder. Men between the ages of 18 and 24 are particularly at risk, creating what [NCPG executive director Keith] Whyte calls a “ticking time bomb” of young people growing up not knowing what it’s like to not have a sportsbook in their pocket at all times.

Drew Gooden made a video about the same subject and, last year, the Fifth Estate investigated sports betting in Canada after it was legalized here in 2021.

It is strange to me how the world of sports gambling is now just an open business like any other. It makes sense to me that it is legal, but to integrate it so tightly with every aspect of a competition is something I admit to being confused about and a little troubled by. I do not mean to be squeamish about adults having a little fun. But it seems to now be just part of how sports are discussed: not about athletics or strategy, but about all the money you could make. Or, probably, lose.

If one downloads Apple’s Sports app, for example, betting odds are displayed near the top of the screen for every game, just below the current score. This is on by default; it is up to users to turn it off. While a user cannot make a bet from within the app, it seems to treat this vice with uncharacteristic casualness.

Chrome and Competition

Michael Liedtke, Associated Press:

The proposed breakup floated in a 23-page document filed late Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice calls for sweeping punishments that would include a sale of Google’s industry-leading Chrome web browser and impose restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine.

[…]

Although regulators stopped short of demanding Google sell Android too, they asserted the judge should make it clear the company could still be required to divest its smartphone operating system if its oversight committee continues to see evidence of misconduct.

Casey Newton:

In addition to requiring that Chrome be divested, the proposal calls for several other major changes that would be enforced over a 10-year period. They include:

  • Blocking Google from making deals like the one it has with Apple to be its default search engine.

  • Requiring it to let device manufacturers show users a “choice screen” with multiple search engine options on it.

  • Licensing data about search queries, results, and what users click on to rivals.

  • Blocking Google from buying or investing in advertising or search companies, including makers of AI chatbots. (Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion into Anthropic last year.)

The full proposal (PDF) is a pretty easy read. One of the weirder ideas pitched by the Colorado side is to have Google “fund a nationwide advertising and education program” which may, among other things, “include reasonable, short-term incentive payments to users” who pick a non-Google search engine from the choice screen.

I am guessing that is not going to happen, and not just because “Plaintiff United States and its Co-Plaintiff States do not join in proposing these remedies”. In fact, much of this wish list seems unlikely to be part of the final judgement expected next summer — in part because it is extensive, in part because of politics, and also because it seems unrelated.

Deborah Mary Sophia, Akash Sriram, and Kenrick Cai, Reuters:

“DOJ will face substantial headwinds with this remedy,” because Chrome can run search engines other than Google, said Gus Hurwitz, senior fellow and academic director at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “Courts expect any remedy to have a causal connection to the underlying antitrust concern. Divesting Chrome does absolutely nothing to address this concern.”

I — an effectively random Canadian with no expertise in this and, so, you should take my perspective with appropriate caveats — disagree.

The objective of disentangling Chrome from Google’s ownership, according to the executive summary (PDF) produced by the Department of Justice, is to remove “a significant challenge to effectuate a remedy that aims to ‘unfetter [these] market[s] from anticompetitive conduct'”:

A successful remedy requires that Google: stop third-party payments that exclude rivals by advantaging Google and discouraging procompetitive partnerships that would offer entrants access to efficient and effective distribution; disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field it has illegally slanted, including, at the outset, licensing syndicated search results that provide potential competitors a chance to offer greater innovation and more effective competition; and reduce Google’s ability to control incentives across the broader ecosystem via ownership and control of products and data complementary to search.

The D.O.J.’s theory of growth reinforcing quality and market dominance is sound, from what I understand, and Google does advantage Chrome in some key ways. Most directly related to this case is whether Chrome activity is connected to Google Search. Despite company executives explicitly denying using Chrome browsing data for ranking, a leak earlier this year confirmed Google does, indeed, consider Chrome views in its rankings.

There is also a setting labelled “Make searches and browsing better”, which automatically “sends URLs of the pages you visit” to Google for users of Chromium-based browsers. Google says this allows the company to “predict what sites you might visit next and to show you additional info about the page you’re visiting” which allows users to “browse faster because content is proactively loaded”.

There is a good question as to how much Google Search would be impacted if Google could not own Chrome or operate its own browser for five years, as the remedy proposes. How much weight these features have in Google’s ranking system is something only Google knows. And the D.O.J. does not propose that Google Search cannot be preloaded in browsers whatsoever. Many users would probably still select Google as their browser’s search engine, too. But Google Search does benefit from Google’s ownership of Chrome itself, so perhaps it is worth putting barriers between the two.

I do not think Chrome can exist as a standalone company. I also do not think it makes sense for another company to own it, since any of those big enough to do so either have their own browsers — Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Edge — or would have the potential to create new anticompetitive problems, like if it were acquired by Meta.

What if the solution looks more like prohibiting Google from uniquely leveraging Chrome to benefit its other products? I do not know how that could be written in legal terms, but it appears to me this is one of the D.O.J.’s goals for separating Chrome and Google.

‘Opinion: Bluesky Is a Dangerous Echo Chamber Because No One Wants to Hear From Me, Specifically’ ⇥ thebeaverton.com

Sam Adams, on Bluesky [sic]:

funny how all the “Bluesky is an echo chamber” opeds sound exactly the same

Mary Gillis, the Beaverton:

So imagine my surprise when instead of welcoming me with open arms and the thousands of new followers I was expecting, Bluesky shunned me.

Why? Because I have some opinions they disagree with. And instead of respecting my inalienable right to be debated, they just… blocked me. Like I’m some kind of annoyance, rather than the iconoclastic and fascinating truth-teller which I know myself to be.

Quality satire.

Every arena of discussion has boundaries for what is acceptable. But only some viewpoints are considered part of an “echo chamber”, and the people who espouse them ought to be subjected, I guess, to abuse and intolerance. I wonder why that is.

Sill Collates Top Links From Your Accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon ⇥ sill.social

Sill allows you to connect your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts — one of each — and see what links are popular among the accounts you follow. As Andy Baio says, it is “like Nuzzel was for Twitter”.

Tyler Fisher:

As decentralized social media continues to grow, I believe it is important to build a strong ecosystem of third party tools that support these networks and embellish their functionality. Sill adds an important piece of that puzzle, a way to get the biggest stories from your networks without remaining glued to your feeds. Above all, Sill promotes a healthier way to use social media.

I have been using Sill for about a week. If it feels familiar, that could be because I posted about it last week before Fisher was ready for broader adoption. I took down my link, but I kept using it because it is fantastic. If you want a high-level overview of what people are linking to, you should check out Sill.

App Store Search Queries Appear to Violate Data Minimization Practices ⇥ mastodon.social

Mysk:

This is an example of what the App Store app shares with Apple when you search for an app. Everything you type in the search field is recorded as an event and associated with your Apple ID before it is sent to Apple. […]

Data is sent to Apple in near real-time (the difference between the Event Time and the Post Time).

I can understand why Apple would want to correlate typed text with autocompletion or suggestions. I can also see why Apple would want to attach completed search queries to an Apple ID. I disagree with both of these things, but I can understand wanting to know whether helpful recommendations are appearing soon enough, and making results more relevant to a user. In theory.

What I cannot understand is why Apple wants to record all typed text and completed queries and correlate those to millisecond-level time codes and attach all that to someone’s Apple ID. This is the very opposite of data minimization — a reality which is unfortunately common among Apple’s services. It is not “tracking” by the company’s definition, which is exclusively concerning third-party sharing, but it violates the spirit of user privacy.

Adam Mosseri Says Threads Will Now Show You More of the Stuff You Have Said You Are Interested in Seeing ⇥ threads.net

Adam Mosseri in a Threads post:

We are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today. For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. This is definitely a work in progress – balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky – thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming.

I read this as more of an apologetic concession than an actual strategy change, and that struck me as odd. Would the Threads team not be glad to deliver to users what they have elected to see, instead of doing a whole bunch of math to badly guess at stuff they might be interested in? The language here is weird, too; Mosseri immediately focuses on the metrics.

However, I think this accurately represents how Threads is viewed. Look at the replies to Mosseri’s post and — while I do not want to imply there is a consistent theme — there are lots of people who are leaning on recommendations with the objective of growing their following and reach, and they are worried. These are the people who see social media as a place for furthering their brand. They are not interesting. The only way they are able to grow their audience is by treating a recommendations algorithm as a problem to be solved.

Mosseri did not say suggested posts would be eliminated from the For You feed, only that the balance would shift. From my experience with it today, it really seems to be better. About half the posts are from accounts I follow, and the rest are proximate to things I care about. It feels completely different from the Threads of a week ago. It is actually — dare I say it? — not bad. At least, that is the case right now. I bet Threads next month will feel entirely changed again.

The Decaf Project ⇥ youtube.com

Here is something I am very excited about: James Hoffmann has finally figured out a way to do what he has been calling — for years — the “decaf project”. The goal is to taste the same batch of coffee decaffeinated in three different processes, and alongside the caffeinated batch.

I am looking forward to this. I ordered my tasting kit from Rosso right here in Calgary; kits are available from dozens of roasters worldwide. If you really like coffee, you might consider ordering one for yourself, too.

Release the X Files ⇥ msnbc.com

Mike Masnick, for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching out to social media companies about election misinformation was a democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s success into the White House himself, and … crickets. The silence is deafening.

One might point to Masnick’s seat on Bluesky’s board of directors as evidence of some kind of conflict of interest; indeed, that is the only complaint I have seen from anyone named in this article or associated with the “Twitter Files”. Sure, it would have been a good idea to disclose that in Masnick’s author bio or somewhere in the piece. But that is not a substantial explanation for the different response to two White House-connected social media platforms after the manufactured alarmism over internal Twitter moderation deliberations.

It is possible these writers — Michael Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss — might eventually post some token objection to Musk’s governance of X and his close government ties. Trump’s Truth Social might even worry them. But there will be no response similar to the Twitter Files: no Congressional hearings at which one of the writers declares (PDF) this a “grave threat”; no wall-to-wall media coverage; and no awkward pretensions about the gravity of this relationship. Instead, these same writers will — as they did during the last Trump presidency — likely mock anyone fretting about this very real close coordination happening right before our very eyes.

‘The App Store Era Must End’ ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

A few years later, Apple began planning how to bring the Mac into the App Store universe. However, macOS was designed in a much earlier era and didn’t offer the level of lockdown that Apple built into iOS. Rather than attempting to lock down the Mac and make it more like iOS, the company wisely chose a different path.

Today’s macOS is a reflection of that decision, and it’s undeniably the right one – not just for the Mac but for every computing device we own.

A blistering but entirely fair analysis. If you are a developer or you are familiar with this history, I do not know that there is a new argument here. But to see them in a single document is compelling.

You may also disagree with Snell’s description of the MacOS model as “undeniably the right one” — maybe your preferred software model has zero permission or authorization prompts. I get that; I, too, am not always thrilled with the way third-party software works on MacOS. Alas, many of the permission dialogs are a patch for ineffective or nonexistent privacy regulations, so all we need to do is fix that. How hard can that be?

I worry the App Store model and the regulatory response has irreparably damaged Apple’s entire ethos. Not destroyed, but definitely damaged. Apple prides itself on making the entire widget: hardware, software, and services. No competitor has a similar model. It has gotten away with this through a combination of user trust, and not being nearly big enough for regulators to be concerned about. But the iPhone fundamentally upset both these qualities.

As Snell writes, the App Store gives users confidence in the software they are downloading and it means Apple has staggering control over all the platforms it used to call “post-P.C. devices”. I think that robs users’ trust. I, for one, am excited by the potential of the Vision Pro, but I know it will always be constrained because of the app model it shares with iOS devices.

Also, because the iPhone is so popular, it is understandable why regulators would want to be a democratic check on corporate power. Alas, their remedies could shake up Apple’s whole-widget ethos.

There are certainly plenty of people who believe Apple should be able to do with the iPhone what it wishes, and that — thanks to the power of the free market — people who do not like those changes will simply go buy something else. Perhaps. But perhaps, too, Apple’s influence over a billion users worldwide is something worth checking on. If Apple had responded more amenably to concerns raised over the past decade, maybe it would not find itself in this position today — but here we are.

Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking U.S. Soldiers and Spies ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

A joint investigation by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), and Netzpolitik.org reveals that US companies legally collecting digital advertising data are also providing the world a cheap and reliable way to track the movements of American military and intelligence personnel overseas, from their homes and their children’s schools to hardened aircraft shelters within an airbase where US nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.

A collaborative analysis of billions of location coordinates obtained from a US-based data broker provides extraordinary insight into the daily routines of US service members. The findings also provide a vivid example of the significant risks the unregulated sale of mobile location data poses to the integrity of the US military and the safety of its service members and their families overseas.

Yet another entry in the ongoing series of stories documenting how we have created a universal unregulated tracking system accessible to basically anyone so that, incidentally, it will make someone slightly more likely to buy a specific brand of cereal. This particular demonstration feels like a reversal of governments using this data to surveil people with less oversight and fewer roadblocks.

The FTC is apparently planning to address this by, according to these reporters, “formally recogniz[ing] US military installations as protected sites”, which is a truly bananas response. The correct answer is for lawmakers to pass a strong privacy framework that restricts data collection and retention, but doing so would be economically costly and would impede the exploitation of this data by the U.S. and its allies. Instead, the world’s most powerful military is going to tell scummy data brokers not to track people within specific areas all over the world.

Reporters and researchers, meanwhile, will continue to point out how this mass data collection makes everyone vulnerable. It feels increasingly like splitting hairs between the surveillance volunteered by U.S. industry, and that which is mandated by more oppressive governments. I recognize there is a difference — the force is the difference — but the effect is comparable.

IMG_0001, IMG_4228 ⇥ walzr.com

Last week, I linked to a very cool project in which Ben Wallace pointed to the seemingly endless depths of barely labelled iPhone video uploads on YouTube. Here are a couple more things along similar lines.

First, Riley Walz built a viewer to shuffle between five million of these videos. There are all manner of music recitals, and people driving exotic cars, and amateur horror shorts, and softball games, and dogs playing — and more. Did not work in Safari for me, but it was fine in a Chromium-based browser; this could just be a me problem. (Via Andy Baio.)

Second, Pete Ashton pointed me to a pair of 2012 projects: one of videos from YouTube, another of photos from Flickr. All share a specific filename in the same format: “IMG_4228”. Each media type is displayed in a unique way. The images are a slideshow. But the videos are all played together in a screen recording; I think that is especially fascinating.

Potential Algorithmic Bias on X During the 2024 U.S. Election ⇥ eprints.qut.edu.au

Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic:

This technical report presents findings from a two-phase analysis investigating potential algorithmic bias in engagement metrics on X (formerly Twitter) by examining Elon Musk’s account against a group of prominent users and subsequently comparing Republican-leaning versus Democrat-leaning accounts. The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics for all accounts under examination. The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024.

While this is presented in academic paper format, you should know that it is still an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed working paper. Its methodology involves just ten X accounts and, as the authors note, their analysis is limited due to the site’s opacity for researchers. Also, the authors do not once mention the assassination attempt that led to Musk’s endorsement on the very same day — a conspicuous absence, I think. None of this means it is inherently inaccurate. It does mean you should hold onto these findings very, very loosely.

It is worth reading, though, because even if I do not entirely trust its findings, it is still compelling (PDF). I am not sure what criteria were used to select the ten accounts in question, but the five Democrat-aligned accounts are all either lawmakers or political leaders in some way. The five Republican-aligned accounts, on the other hand, are all commentators and also Donald Trump Jr., and I am not sure that is a reasonable comparison. Surely it would be better to compare like-to-like.

Even so, it sure appears the date of Musk’s endorsement matches the timing of a change in political activity on X. One possibility is for the assassination attempt and endorsement to have caused more activity on his platform, and specifically among those who do not find its owner to be an odious buffoon. However, a more cynical possibility suggested by this research is of the platform taking sides, despite its new owner promising neutrality. Theoretically, we can check this for ourselves. In the name of “full transparency”, X published “the algorithm” on GitHub; indeed, it appears it was updated around the same time as these researchers found this partisan boost. But there is not a corresponding public commit — no public commits, in fact, since July 2023, as of writing — so it is impossible to know if this is related or just someone fixing a typo. “Transparency” does not work when it depends on unreliable actors.

Also, if the work of these researchers represents a true shift, I believe it will be the first time fears of an explicitly partisan influence on algorithmic recommendations have been demonstrated in the United States. Meta has avoided suggesting posts it deems political in nature — probably because they are more difficult to moderate, and partly because it is beneficial for Meta to ingratiate itself with the incoming administration. TikTok, despite public fears, has no demonstrated partisan political influence.

But X? Its users and ownership have carved out a space for explicit discrimination and — possibly — partisan bias.

A Popular A.I. Training Set Includes Data from OpenSubtitles ⇥ theatlantic.com

Alex Reisner, the Atlantic:

I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. […]

The files within this data set are not scripts, exactly. Rather, they are subtitles taken from a website called OpenSubtitles.org. Users of the site typically extract subtitles from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and internet streams using optical-character-recognition (OCR) software. Then they upload the results to OpenSubtitles.org, which now hosts more than 9 million subtitle files in more than 100 languages and dialects. […]

The Atlantic has built a search engine of subtitles used in training. This is in addition to — but in the same data set as — YouTube subtitles.

The files provided by websites like OpenSubtitles are, to my knowledge, not exactly legal. Courts in Australia and the Netherlands have treated them as distinct works protected by copyright. I am not arguing this is correct — fan-created subtitles are useful and can permit more translation options — but it is noteworthy for these models to be trained not only on original works without explicit permission, but also on derivative works made illegally.

Put it this way: would it be right if models used for generating movies were trained on a corpus of pirated movies, or music to be trained on someone’s LimeWire collection? It arguably does not matter whether copyright holders were paid for the single copy used in training materials, since it is a derivative created without permission in either case. But it feels a tiny bit worse to know generative models were trained using illicit subtitles instead of quasi-legitimate ones.

What Is a Skeptic? ⇥ defector.com

Albert Burneko, Defector:

What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter. A person who rejects empirical knowledge, who refuses the answers that exist while requesting ones more to their liking that flatter their preference for unfounded contrarian gibberish and conspiratorial paranoia, is not a skeptic. They’re the exact opposite of that: a mark. A sucker. A credulous boob.

There is nothing wrong with asking questions, even about well-founded and understood phenomena — but the asker must be honestly willing to accept answers, not using questions as a sly means of discrediting actual knowledge and expertise.

My one complaint with Burneko’s piece can be found in this sentence a little bit later:

[…] At any rate, “vaccine skeptic” certainly is nicer and less contentious than calling Kennedy a motivated bullshitter, a peddler of antiscientific garbage, the type of dogshit-brained imbecile who will stiff-arm all that can be learned from centuries of medical research and practice because he preferred what he learned from a 25-second TikTok video made by a spiral-eyed homeschool casualty who’ll be hospitalized next month with an illness that hasn’t sickened a human being since the Bronze Age. […]

To be clear, it is not this sentence itself I have a problem with. This is phenomenal. Burneko’s essays are among my favourite things I read in any given year.

No, the problem I have is that this sentence sits in the middle of a paragraph about how the New York Times uses words like “skeptic” to launder and, by extension, validate the unhinged claims of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but it dismisses his knowledge as coming from a “25-second TikTok video”. That is not where he is learning these things. What is offensive is that Kennedy’s view of health and disease comes from a mix of a specific ecosystem pushing these claims, and mainstream media outlets like the Times giving them a modicum of credibility.

It is not just Kennedy; a 2011 article in the Times about Andrew Wakefield is front-loaded with descriptions of the “controversial figure” and his “concerns about the safety of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine”. It takes a couple thousand more words to get to Brian Deer’s brutal debunking, but it is only afforded a small chunk of the article, with the author writing “it would take a book to encompass” the back-and-forth between Deer and Wakefield. To a casual reader, this article would feel like a cautious middle-ground approach even though, at the time it was published, Deer had already released the scathing results of his investigation in a series of Sunday Times articles and a documentary. Luckily, a book is now also available.

Voice-from-nowhere journalism may not be solely responsible for the beliefs of people like Kennedy, but it validates those views all the same. Media should be skeptical, in that it ought to continuously ask questions and articulate the answers and the evidence.

Canadian Right-to-Repair Legislation Receives Royal Assent ⇥ theregister.com

Brandon Vigliarolo, the Register:

Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada’s Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of “maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing,” and “to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component.”

Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixIt:

There’s one major limitation that Canada shares with the US: neither country allows for the trafficking of repair tools. While Canadians can now legally bypass TPMs to fix their own devices, they can’t legally sell or share tools designed for that purpose. This means Canadian consumers and repair pros still face technical and legal hurdles to access the necessary repair tools, much like in the US.

This win for Canadians is still huge — it’s the first time federal law anywhere has tackled digital locks in favor of repair. But the restriction on tools limits who can benefit, which is why the repair fight continues.

This legislation has been a long time coming. I thought I had written about C–244 earlier this year, but it turns out it was last November. Still, progress, and with unanimous agreement.

Slop on Spotify ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

[…] But so had a lot of artists with single-word names, such as Swans, Asia, Standards, and Gong. A new album would appear on an artist’s Spotify page, bearing their name but no similarity to their music. Sometimes, as with the fake HEALTH albums, they would disappear after a few days. Other times, they would linger indefinitely, even against the artist’s will.

[…]

It looks like Standards, Annie, HEALTH, Swans, and a number of other notable one-word artists were targeted directly. Spotify confirmed that the onslaught of AI garbage was delivered from one source, the licensor Ameritz Music. Ameritz Music did not respond to a request for comment.

The great ensloppening of the internet continues — except, in the case of Spotify, this is a repeat problem.

The Onion Buys InfoWars ⇥ theonion.com

Ben Collins today promised “the funniest news you’ve ever heard in your entire life” and, boy, did he deliver.

“Bryce P. Tetraeder”, “CEO” of Global Tetrahedron, as published the Onion:

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

The CEO may be fake, but this is real: the Onion bought InfoWars with the assistance of the families of Sandy Hook victims. The relaunched site will be supported by Everytown for Gun Safety. What a perfect, full-circle kind of outcome to dilute the influence of one of the worst figures in media.

Congratulations to Collins on being the proud owner of InfoWars’ assets, legally speaking. Given the hosts’ predilection for heavy drinking and indoor smoking, I bet the studio reeks.

Update: Some no-fun judge might be a real jackass about this whole thing and do the second-least-funny thing this year.

Misguided Apple Intelligence Ads ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

In the first ad, Apple Intelligence enables a goof-off who wastes time and annoys his colleagues to surprise his boss with an unexpectedly well-written email. It’s not clear that the boss is impressed; he just can’t believe the guy would have written a professional message.

[…]

The second ad channels a similar suggestion — that Apple Intelligence is a crutch for the thoughtless. […]

Michael Tsai:

It’s really quite a different message than a bicycle for the mind.

These ads come across either as unimaginative as the people they represent, or as a Freudian slip, depending on your perspective.

The first is a little better than the second because it at least hints at something I bet many of us dread: writing work email. But why not a version which elevates someone who cares? The armchair director in me wants this to be an employee who is clearly trying hard, writing a frustrated email to someone who is not, and needing to adjust the tone of a pretty mean email.

The second ad is beyond helping. If someone had handed me their own phone with a photo slideshow at any point in the past five years, I would have assumed they did not make it themselves. I do not know anybody in real life who has ever done so.

I know there are many A.I. skeptics out there — those who think the whole thing is a bust. But even if that describes you, try setting that aside and put on your best marketing smile: even you can probably imagine a handful of ways to show features like these in ways that do not make people look lazy or forgetful. How about someone struggling to find the words for something, using Writing Tools for inspiration, and then making edits to fit their personality? Or someone searching through their photo library with vague terms for a specific picture — say, a special dinner with a particular dish they want to make again? Or someone finding memories of an apartment they are leaving as they move to another city? I am sure someone on the marketing team pitched ideas like these and they were shot down for one reason or another, but they all feel more palatable to me than what I see here.

Update: I live my life by the adage never read the comments but, in this case, it would have been useful. “Joe Mac User” on TidBits points to two other ads, one of which is pretty similar to my thoughts of how to improve the first of the ads Engst linked to. Maybe that makes me biased, but it is easily the least inappropriate of these four.