App Store Restrictions Face Scrutiny in China, U.K. ⇥ bbc.com

Liam Mo and Brenda Goh, Reuters:

A group of 55 Chinese iPhone and iPad users filed a complaint with China’s market regulator on Monday, a lawyer representing the group said, alleging that Apple abuses its market dominance by restricting app distribution and payments to its own platforms while charging high commissions.

[…]

This marks the second complaint against Apple led by Wang. A similar case filed in 2021 was dismissed by a Shanghai court last year.

Imran Rahman-Jones, BBC News:

But the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has designated both Apple and Google as having “strategic market status” – effectively saying they have a lot of power over mobile platforms.

The ruling has drawn fury from the tech giants, with Apple saying it risked harming consumers through “weaker privacy” and “delayed access to new features”, while Google called the decision “disappointing, disproportionate and unwarranted”.

The CMA said the two companies “may be limiting innovation and competition”.

Pretty soon it may be easier to list the significant markets in which Apple is still able to exercise complete control over iOS app distribution.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Atlas ⇥ openai.com

Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch:

OpenAI announced Tuesday the launch of its AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, a major step in the company’s quest to unseat Google as the main way people find information online.

The company says Atlas will first roll out on macOS, with support for Windows, iOS, and Android coming soon. OpenAI says the product will be available to all free users at launch.

Atlas, like Perplexity’s Comet, is a Chromium-based browser. You cannot use it without signing in to ChatGPT. As I was completing the first launch experience, shimmering colours radiated from the setup window and — no joke — it looked like my computer’s screen was failing.

OpenAI:

As you use Atlas, ChatGPT can get smarter and more helpful, too. Browser memories let ChatGPT remember context from the sites you visit and bring that context back when you need it. This means you can ask ChatGPT questions like: “Find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends so I can prepare for interviews.” Browser memories in Atlas are completely optional, and you’re always in control: you can view or archive them at any time in settings, and deleting browsing history deletes any associated browser memories.

I love the idea of this. So often, I need to track down something I remember reading, but have only the haziest recollection of what, exactly, it is. I want this in my life. Yet I have zero indication I can trust OpenAI with retaining and synthesizing useful information from my browsing history.

The company says it only retains pages until they have been summarized, and I am sure it thinks it is taking privacy as seriously as it can. But what about down the road? What could it do with all of this data it does retain — information that is tied to your ChatGPT account? OpenAI wants to be everywhere, and it wants to know everything about you to an even greater extent than Google or Meta have been able to accomplish. Why should I trust it? What makes the future of OpenAI look different than the trajectories of the information-hungry businesses before it?

Federico Viticci’s M5 iPad Pro Review ⇥ macstories.net

Even if you are not interested in the iPad or Apple product news generally, I recommend making time for Federico Viticci’s review, at MacStories, of the new iPad Pro. Apple claims 3.5× performance gains with A.I. models, so Viticci attempted to verify that number. Unfortunately, he ran into some problems.

Viticci (emphasis his):

This is the paradox of the M5. Theoretically speaking, the new Neural Accelerator architecture should lead to notable gains in token generation and prefill time that may be appreciated on macOS by developers and AI enthusiasts thanks to MLX (more on this below). However, all these improvements amount to very little on iPadOS today because there is no serious app ecosystem for local AI development and tinkering on iPad. That ecosystem absolutely exists on the Mac. On the iPad, we’re left with a handful of non-MLX apps from the App Store, no Terminal, and the untapped potential of the M5.

In case it’s not clear, I’m coming at this from a perspective of disappointment, not anger. […]

Viticci’s frustration with the state of A.I. models on the iPad Pro is palpable. Ideally and hopefully, it is a future-friendly system, but that is not usually the promise of Apple’s products. It usually likes to tell a complete story with the potential for sequels. To get even a glimpse of what that story looks like, Viticci had to go to great lengths, as documented in his review.

In the case of this iPad Pro, it is marketing leaps-and-bounds boosts in A.I. performance — though those claims appear to be optimistic — while still playing catch-up on last year’s Apple intelligence announcements, and offering little news for a user who wants to explore A.I. models directly on their iPad. It feels like a classic iPad story: incredible hardware, restricted by Apple’s software decisions.

Update: I missed a followup post from Viticci in which he points to a review from Max Weinbach of Creative Strategies. Weinbach found the M5 MacBook Pro does, indeed, post A.I. performance gains closer to Apple’s claims.

As an aside, I think it is curious for Apple to be supplying review units to Creative Strategies. It is nominally a research and analysis firm, not a media outlet. While there are concerns about the impartiality of reviewers granted access to prerelease devices, it feels to me like an entirely different thing for a broad-ranging research organization for reasons I cannot quite identify.

Long Lines for Election Day in Alberta ⇥ globalnews.ca

Ken MacGillivray and Karen Bartko, Global News:

“All electors are legislatively required to complete a Statement of Eligibility form (Form 13) at the voting station. This form is a declaration by an elector that they meet the required legislated criteria to receive and cast ballots,” Elections Edmonton said.

[…]

Those casting ballots say confirming voters are on the register or completing the necessary paperwork takes three to five minutes per voter.

I was lucky to be in and out of my polling place in about fifteen minutes, but the longest part was waiting for the person to diligently copy my name, address, and date-of-birth from my driver’s license to a triplicate form, immediately after confirming the same information on the printed voter roll. It is a silly requirement coming down as part of a larger unwanted package from our provincial government for no clear reason. The same legislation also prohibits electronic tabulation, so all the ballots are slowly being counted by hand. These are the kinds of measures that only begin to make sense if you assume someone with influence in our provincial government watches too much Fox News.

I wonder if our Minister of Red Tape Reduction has heard about all the new rules and restrictions implemented by his colleagues.

The Blurry Future of Sora ⇥ wired.com

Jason Parham, Wired:

The uptick in artificial social networks, [Rudy] Fraser tells me, is being driven by the same tech egoists who have eroded public trust and inflamed social isolation through “divisive” algorithms. “[They] are now profiting on that isolation by creating spaces where folks can surround themselves with sycophantic bots.”

I saw this quote circulating on Bluesky over the weekend and it has been rattling around my head since. It cuts to the heart of one reason why A.I.-based “social” networks like Sora and Meta’s Vibes feel so uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, I found the very next paragraph from Parham uncompelling:

In the many conversations I had with experts, similar patterns of thought emerged. The current era of content production prioritizes aesthetics over substance. We are a culture hooked on optimization and exposure; we crave to be seen. We live on our phones and through our screens. We’re endlessly watching and being watched, submerged in a state of looking. With a sort of all-consuming greed, we are transforming into a visual-first society — an infinite form of entertainment for one another to consume, share, fight over, and find meaning through.

Of course our media reflects aesthetic trends and tastes; it always has. I do not know that there was a halcyon era of substance-over-style media, nor do I believe there was a time since celebrity was a feasible achievement in which at least some people did not desire it. In a 1948 British survey of children 10–15 years old, one-sixth to one-third of respondents aspired to “‘romantic’ [career] choices like film acting, sport, and the arts”. An article published in Scouting Magazine in 2000 noted children leaned toward high-profile careers — not necessarily celebrity, but jobs “every child is exposed to”. We love this stuff because we have always loved this stuff.

Among the bits I quibble with in the above, however, this stood out as a new and different thing: “[w]e’re endlessly watching and being watched”. That, I think, is the kind of big change Fraser is quoted as speaking about, and something I think is concerning. We already worried about echo chambers, and platforms like YouTube responded by adjusting recommendations to less frequently send users to dark places. Let us learn something, please.

Cal Newport:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn’t be entertaining the idea, ​as [Sam] Altman did last week​, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy AI-generated “erotica.”

To me, these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought, although very cool and powerful, isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.

I do not think Sora smells of desperation, but I do think it is the product of a company that views unprecedented scale as its primary driver. I think OpenAI wants to be everywhere — and not in the same way that a consumer electronics company wants its smartphones to be the category’s most popular, or anything like that. I wonder if Ben Thompson’s view of OpenAI as “the Windows of A.I.” is sufficient. I think OpenAI is hoping to be a ubiquitous layer in our digital world; or, at least, it is behaving that way.

I Bet Normal Users Will Figure Out Which Power Adapter to Buy ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber, responding to my exploration of the MacBook Pro A.C. adapter non-issue:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Maybe. I think it is fair to be concerned about this being another thing people have to think about when buying a laptop. But, in my experience, less technically adept people still believe they need specific cables and chargers, even when they do not.

When I was in college, a friend forgot to bring the extension cable for their MacBook charger. There was an unused printer in the studio, though, so I was able to use the power cable from that because it is an interchangeable standard plug. I see this kind of thing all the time among friends, family members, and colleagues. It makes sense in a world frequently populated by proprietary adapters.

Maybe some people will end up with underpowered USB-C chargers. I bet a lot of people will just go to the Apple Store and buy the one recommended by staff, though.

Latest Beta of Apple’s Operating Systems Adds Another Translucency Control ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

You can find the new option [in 26.1 beta 4] on iPhone and iPad by going to the Settings app and navigating to the Display & Brightness menu. On the Mac, it’s available in the “Appearance” menu in System Settings. Here, you’ll see a new Liquid Glass menu with “Clear” and “Tinted” options.

“Choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass. Clear is more transparent, revealing the content beneath. Tinted increases opacity and adds more contrast,” Apple explains.

After Apple made the menu bar translucent in Mac OS X Leopard, it added a preference to make the bar solid after much pushback. When it refreshed the design of Mac OS X in Yosemite with more frosted glass effects, it added controls to Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast, which replaced the menu bar-specific setting.

Here we are with yet another theme built around translucency, and more complaints about legibility and contrast — Miller writes “Apple says it heard from users throughout the iOS 26 beta testing period that they’d like a setting to manage the opaqueness of the Liquid Glass design”. Now, as has become traditional, there is another way to moderate the excesses of Apple’s new visual language. I am sure there are some who will claim this undermines the entire premise of Liquid Glass, and I do not know that they are entirely wrong. Some might call it greater personalization and customization, too. I think it feels unfocused. Apple keeps revisiting translucency and finding it needs to add more controls to compensate.

NSO Group Banned From Using or Supplying WhatsApp Exploits ⇥ courthousenews.com

Carly Nairn, Courthouse News Service:

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said in a 25-page ruling that there was evidence NSO Group’s flagship spyware could still infiltrate WhatApp users’ devices and granted Meta’s request for a permanent injunction.

However, Hamilton, a Bill Clinton appointee, also determined that any damages would need to follow a ratioed amount of compensation based on a legal framework designed to proportion damages. She ordered that the jury-based award of $167 million should be reduced to a little over $4 million.

Once again, I am mystified by Apple’s decision to drop its suit against NSO Group. What Meta won is protection from WhatsApp being used as an installation vector for NSO’s spyware; importantly, high-value WhatsApp users won a modicum of protection from NSO’s customers. And, as John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab points out, NSO has “an absolute TON of their business splashed all over the court records”. There are several depositions from which an enterprising journalist could develop a better understanding of this creepy spyware company.

Last week, NSO Group confirmed it had been acquired by U.S. investors. However, according to its spokesperson, its “headquarters and core operations remain in Israel [and] continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities”.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

NSO has long claimed that its spyware is designed to not target U.S. phone numbers, likely to avoid hurting its chances to enter the U.S. market. But the company was caught in 2021 targeting about a dozen U.S. government officials abroad.

Soon after, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American companies from trading with NSO by putting the spyware maker on the U.S. Entities List. Since then, NSO has tried to get off the U.S. government’s blocklist, as recently as May 2025, with the help of a lobbying firm tied to the Trump administration.

I have as many questions about what this change in ownership could mean for its U.S. relationship as I do about how it affects possible targets.

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The New MacBook Pro Is €35 Less Expensive in E.U. Countries, Ships Without a Charger ⇥ macrumors.com

Are you outraged? Have you not heard? Apple updated its entry-level MacBook Pro with a new M5 chip, and across Europe, it does not ship with an A.C. adapter in the box as standard any more. It still comes with a USB-C to MagSafe cable, and you can add an adapter at checkout, but those meddling E.U. regulators have forced Apple to do something stupid and customer-unfriendly again. Right?

William Gallagher, of AppleInsider, gets it wrong:

Don’t blame Apple this time — if you’re in the European Union or the UK, your new M5 14-inch MacBook Pro or iPad Pro may cost you $70 extra because Apple isn’t allowed to bundle a charger.

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it. Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter.

In Ireland, the MacBook Pro used to start at €1,949; it now starts at €1,849; in France, it was €1,899, and it is now €1,799. As mentioned, the adapter is €65, making these new Macs €35 less with a comparable configuration. The same is true in each Euro-currency country I checked: Germany, Italy, and Spain all received a €100 price cut if you do not want an A.C. adapter, and a €35 price cut if you do.

It is not just countries that use the Euro receiving cuts. In Norway, the new MacBook Pro starts at 2,000 krone less than the one it replaces, and a charger is 849 krone. In Hungary, it is 50,000 forint less, with a charger costing about 30,000 forint. There are some exceptions, too. In Switzerland, the new models are 50 francs less, but a charger is 59 francs. And in the U.K., there is no price adjustment, even though the charger is a configure-to-order option there, too.

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. (For the sake of brevity and because not all of these pages have been recently crawled by the Internet Archive, I have not included links to each comparison. I welcome checking my work, however, and would appreciate an email if I missed an interesting price change.)

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

Gallagher:

It doesn’t appear that Apple has cut prices of the MacBook Pro or iPad Pro to match, either. That can’t be proven, though, because at least with the UK, Apple generally does currency conversion just by swapping symbols.

It can be proven if you bother to put in thirty minutes’ work.

Joe Rossignol, of MacRumors, also gets it a little wrong:

According to the European Union law database, Apple could have let customers in Europe decide whether they wanted to have a charger included in the box or not, but the company has ultimately decided to not include one whatsoever: […]

A customer can, in fact, choose to add an A.C. adapter when they order their Mac.

OpenAI and Nvidia Are at the Centre of a Trillion-Dollar Circular Investment Economy ⇥ bloomberg.com

Tabby Kinder in New York and George Hammond, Financial Times:

OpenAI has signed about $1tn in deals this year for computing power to run its artificial intelligence models, commitments that dwarf its revenue and raise questions about how it can fund them.

Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh, Bloomberg:

For much of the AI boom, there have been whispers about Nvidia’s frenzied dealmaking. The chipmaker bolstered the market by pumping money into dozens of AI startups, many of which rely on Nvidia’s graphics processing units to develop and run their models. OpenAI, to a lesser degree, also invested in startups, some of which built services on top of its AI models. But as tech firms have entered a more costly phase of AI development, the scale of the deals involving these two companies has grown substantially, making it harder to ignore.

The day after Nvidia and OpenAI announced their $100 billion investment agreement, OpenAI confirmed it had struck a separate $300 billion deal with Oracle to build out data centers in the US. Oracle, in turn, is spending billions on Nvidia chips for those facilities, sending money back to Nvidia, a company that is emerging as one of OpenAI’s most prominent backers.

I possess none of the skills most useful to understand what all of this means. I am not an economist; I did not have a secret life as an investment banker. As a layperson, however, it is not comforting to read from some People With Specialized Knowledge that this is similar to historically good circular investments, just at an unprecedented scale, while other People With Specialized Knowledge say this has been the force preventing the U.S. from entering a recession. These articles might be like one of those prescient papers from before the Great Recession. Not a great feeling.

The New ‘Foreign Influence’ Scare ⇥ 404media.co

Emmanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

Democratic U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren sent letters to the Department of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson, raising concerns about the $55 billion acquisition of the giant American video game company in part by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Specifically, the Senators worry that EA, which just released Battlefield 6 last week and also publishes The Sims, Madden, and EA Sports FC, “would cease exercising editorial and operational independence under the control of Saudi Arabia’s private majority ownership.”

“The proposed transaction poses a number of significant foreign influence and national security risks, beginning with the PIF’s reputation as a strategic arm of the Saudi government,” the Senators wrote in their letter. […]

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the assumption was that it would be democratic nations successfully using the web for global influence. But I think the 2016 U.S. presidential election, during which Russian operatives worked to sway voters’ intentions, was a reality check. Fears of foreign influence were then used by U.S. lawmakers to justify banning TikTok, and to strongarm TikTok into allowing Oracle to oversee its U.S. operations. Now, it is Saudi Arabian investment in Electronic Arts raising concerns. Like TikTok, it is not the next election that is, per se, at risk, but the general thoughts and opinions of people in the United States.

U.S. politicians even passed a law intended to address “foreign influence” concerns. However, Saudi Arabia is not one of the four “covered nations” restricted by PAFACA.

Aside from xenophobia, I worry “foreign influence” is becoming a new standard excuse for digital barriers. We usually associate restrictive internet policies with oppressive and authoritarian regimes that do not trust their citizens to be able to think for themselves. This is not to say foreign influence is not a reasonable concern, nor that Saudi Arabia has no red flags, nor still that these worries are a purely U.S. phenomenon. Canadian officials are similarly worried about adversarial government actors covertly manipulating our policies and public opinion. But I think we need to do better if we want to support a vibrant World Wide Web. U.S. adversaries are allowed to have big, successful digital products, too.

More on Liquid Glass ⇥ tidbits.com

Adam Engst, TidBits:

So, no, I don’t want tools that “give way to content” or “shrink to bring focus to the content.” When I’m cooking, I want my knives, spatulas, measuring spoons, and the like exactly where they belong, so they’re instantly at hand. My Mac is set up in much the same way, with every app appearing exactly where I expect and, for the most part, providing an interface that looks and works as I want.

Engst pointedly differentiates “productivity apps — real tools” from apps permitting a more passive consumption of media. It may make more sense for controls to fade away in something like a media player. In most of the apps I use every day, however, I want to have obvious and immediate access to the tools I need.

Here is another cooking analogy: a minimum requirement, for me, for a stove is for it to be equipped with physical knobs. I do not want to be hunting for the magic capacitive spot or pressing a +/– toggle to change a burner’s setting. The latter options seem more elegant; they give the impression of refinement. But they are less effective for the same job because they do not allow for real-world practicality.

Engst also wrote a well-illustrated guide to the many accessibility settings and hidden preferences to configure Apple’s operating systems for different contrast and usability preferences. A notable issue with these settings is that some properties of Liquid Glass are not truly the fault of transparency. Instead, a Liquid Glass element — like Control Centre — might be reflecting the colours around it, giving the impression of translucency without actually being translucent. This effect does not appear in window-specific screenshots when you have “Reduce Transparency” turned on so, as Engst writes, it makes it better for creating screenshots for documentation. But it does mean that, while the “Reduce Transparency” setting is literally true, it feels dishonest.

Raluca Budiu, of Nielsen Norman Group, published a critical assessment of Liquid Glass with a number of agreeable points. The customized iMessage conversation is appropriately hideous. However, I found the argument against the more prominent Search button in many apps unconvincing:

Search in earlier versions of iOS lived at the top of the page. In Mail or Messages, users had to scroll down to reveal the bar. It wasn’t the most discoverable pattern, but years of repetition made it second nature.

Now, in iOS 26, search has migrated to the bottom of the screen and is always visible. For newcomers this might feel easier to find, but for long‑time users it’s a jarring break from habit that slows them down until the new pattern becomes ingrained. (Even if the new pattern might prove beneficial over time, existing users must relearn it, which in the short run means lost productivity and added frustration.)

It is not often I see NNG criticizing an improvement in making a control more obvious. While I suppose it is true that users will need to understand they can simply tap the search button instead of remembering to scroll for the hidden field, I cannot imagine this relearning is as arduous as the long-term impact of hiding the search function.

What is disappointing is that the hidden search field still exists in a handful of places. Most notably, Music on iOS 26 still has two different kinds of Search: the one you can get to by tapping on the button in the bottom-right, and the locally-scoped one you will find at the top of views like Playlists.

Meta Takes a Principled Stance Against Having Principles ⇥ wbez.org

In January, Mark Zuckerberg bade farewell to the ostensibly censorial administration of Joe Biden, welcoming in the nominally free speech offered by Donald Trump’s then-incoming presidency. The complaints about Biden aired by Zuckerberg on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast were weak, misleading, and silly, but they helped continue the narrative championed by many U.S. politicians who are now in a position to help Meta.

In a video announcing the changes to the company’s moderation policy, Zuckerberg lamented the “censorship” users have faced, and promised to collaborate with the government to fight those demands:

Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more. The US has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws, institutionalizing censorship, and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censored our apps from even working in the country. The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government, and that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship.

This explanation is mostly nonsense — and dishonest.

Nader Issa, WBEZ Chicago:

At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to report sightings of federal immigration agents in the Chicago area has been taken down by the social media giant Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The group, called “ICE Sighting-Chicagoland,” has been increasingly used over the last five weeks of “Operation Midway Blitz,” President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign, to warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores and other community staples so they can take steps to protect themselves.

If this group was actually used for “coordinated harm”, as Meta claims, surely it or the Department of Justice could give some specific examples. I could only find one archived copy of the page and I see nothing of the sort in what is admittedly a handful of posts. I also do not see anything looking remotely like “coordinated harm” in the posts cached by Google.

The point is not Meta’s hypocrisy on what it will remove compared to what it will defend, but what this hypocrisy achieves. Meta spent years using a socially conscious image to help marginalized people feel safer, albeit only after a long history of controversy over privacy violations, harassment, and gender-based abuse (PDF).

Now it is using a combination of regressive policies and assisting the government’s domestic quasi-military invasions to ingratiate itself with this administration. If Meta were trying to appeal to the public or advertisers, it would not be so subservient to this administration — people in the U.S. are more suspicious of government power than in recent memory, and disapprove of ICE. Meta is completely on-board with this administration’s demands. If there is a line these companies will not cross, we might find it if we reach it.

D’Angelo Dies Aged 51 ⇥ variety.com

Steven J. Horowitz and Jem Aswad, Variety:

D’Angelo, a legendary R&B singer who helped pioneer neo-soul, has died. He was 51.

You know how an artist page on Apple Music might have, above the row of their albums, a selection of “Essential Albums”? All three of D’Angelo’s records are deservedly listed as “Essential” on his page. D’Angelo made the kind of music that felt instantly timeless; classic and contemporary in equal measure. Everything he made felt distinctly him. This one hurts.

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Apple Has Discontinued the Clips App You Probably Forgot About ⇥ macrumors.com

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Apple has essentially discontinued Clips, its video-editing app designed to allow users to combine video clips, images, and photos with voice-based titles, music, filters, and graphics to create enhanced videos that can be shared on social media sites.

I do not know what Slivka means by “essentially”; Apple says it is gone, though it remains listed in the “Creativity” category on Apple’s first-party apps webpage. This is not surprising to me. Before it was pulled offline, it was most recently updated in May 2024.

I am truly curious about the likely lifespan of a few recent Apple apps. How much longer will Invites last? Sports seems like it could be around for longer, but I am a little worried about Classical, which still does not have a Mac app.

Canadian Liberals Introduce Second, Less-Controversial Border Bill, but Still Want to Pass the First One With Creepiness Intact ⇥ cbc.ca

Michael Geist:

he government today reversed course on its ill-advised anti-privacy measures in Bill C-2, introducing a new border bill with the lawful access provisions (Parts 14 and 15) removed. The move is welcome given the widespread opposition to provisions that would have created the power to demand warrantless access to information from any provider of a service in Canada and increased the surveillance on Canadian networks. The sheer breadth of this proposed system was truly unprecedented and appeared entirely inconsistent with Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. […]

While the removal of those sections is a positive sign, Geist’s celebration is not the full story.

Jim Bronskill, Canadian Press:

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the government would still pursue passage of the first bill, C-2, which proposes giving authorities new powers to search mail and access personal information.

The move means the federal border security proposals will proceed through Parliament on two separate legislative tracks, with Bill C-12 likely moving ahead first.

Bill C-2 would then make its way through Parliament, with elements included in the new C-12 deleted to avoid duplication.

Last legislative session, and for the past three years, the Liberals have been pitching a much-needed update to our privacy laws. Anandasangaree voted in favour of it. Yet he is also responsible for this privacy hostile legislation that, for some reason, this government is fighting for. And, though the Conservatives are presently objecting to the privacy violating clauses in C–2, Geist points out that “[s]uccessive governments — both Liberal and Conservative — have tried to bring in lawful access” of similar nature. We need to take privacy seriously, not with the cynicism of these two parties.

‘How Did Somebody Make This?’ ⇥ theoatmeal.com

Matthew Inman:

AI has accelerated our abilities like that drug from the movie Limitless. It’s writing our papers, analyzing our bloodwork, and planning our weddings. Now your average Keith has the critical thinking abilities of a supercomputer running at ten-trilion teraclops per floppyshart.

It enables ordinary minds to have extraordinary abilities.

Inman’s thoughts on A.I. tools for creativity are similar to my own. There are plenty of ways to use them to lighten the load on mundane and uncreative tasks. But whole-cloth generation in a fake social network is such a poor outcome.

I got the title of this post from near the top of the comic. It will stick with me. A good question to ask when looking at an artwork is “who made this?”, and learning more about what motivated them and what influences they had. This is a vast opportunity for learning about art of all mediums, and it even applies to commercial projects. Sometimes I look up the portfolios of photographers I find on stock image sites; their non-stock work is often interesting and different. There is potential for asking both questions of A.I.-assisted works in the hands of interesting artists. But it is too often a tool used to circumvent the process entirely, producing work that has nothing to offer beyond its technical accomplishment.

We all have ordinary minds that have been shaped by time and practice to be able to do different extraordinary things. Each of us cannot do most of the skill-dependent things most other people in the world can do. In the right hands, A.I. tools can help produce some fantastic art, but the art probably will not come from the collective digital mind of everything scraped from the internet. It comes from people who think creatively and apply technology to that.

‘Give Me a Single Reason Why Sora 2 Should Exist’ ⇥ youtube.com

The technical accomplishments of Sora 2 are laudable and, frankly, extraordinary. Just watch the first two minutes of the live-streamed announcement, or the examples from six minutes onward. If the ability to turn a few words into all kinds of video — from photorealistic to animated — with sound does not blow your mind, I do not know what will. If I went back in time to just ten years ago to show this to myself, I would have assumed my future self came from far, far in the future.

But OpenAI, like many of its peers, is not super interested in bragging about how clever this technology is in the videos its product generates. Videos made with Sora include a “Sora” watermark that moves to a different location around the margins every few seconds, making it more difficult but not impossible to crop. But nowhere does it say “A.I. generated” on the video. And why not? Surely OpenAI ought to be proud of its achievements.

The wildest thing to me about the Sora app is that it is a social network. It looks like TikTok. You can follow users and scroll through videos in a “For You” stream-of-unconsciousness. Mine is full of several videos gutting the soul of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and replacing it with whining about the barest of restrictions enacted by OpenAI.

The social impact of this — and the new Vibes feed in Meta’s A.I. app — is a realization of an “A.I. television” that will, surely, have grave consequences because the most popular A.I. services care way too much about growth and proving their own cleverness. Sure, there are guardrails and limitations. But, as Hank Green says in a righteously ranty video, “the friction matters”.

This technology may, to some extent, break down the barriers involved in making video, but we should not pretend that is the objective here, or even halfway considered by any of these A.I. companies. They want to make gimmicks. They want to do the problems of the last twenty years of social media, but all of it is fake, and they want to call that “innovation”. I will echo Green’s call: give me a single reason why this should exist.