Rexfeng

They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should:Someone’s gone and made a Google Chrome extension that turns every image on YouTube into the Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson thumbnail version. It’s called “YouTube MrBeastify” and it’s too cursed to ignore.

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While I’m on a font kick, I greatly enjoyed this essay from Jonathan Hoefler:

Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Sometime in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.

I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.

Storyteller is a game about writing, word puzzles and the twisted tales we tell ourselves just to get through the day, and it'll be playable on Android and iOS via Netflix on September 26th. Storyteller is published by Annapurna Interactive and it landed on Switch and PC on March 23rd — after spending more than a decade in development. 

Solo creator Daniel Benmergui announced Storyteller in 2011, and a prototype of the game actually won the Nuovo award for innovation at the Game Developers Conference in 2012. After that, life happened and Benmergui stopped working on Storyteller for a few years, but he eventually picked it back up and found a publishing partner in Annapurna.

In Storyteller, players compose narrative arcs using comic book-style building blocks, altering the lives, deaths, romances and betrayals of medieval characters in the process. It's a soothing, surprising and often amusing experience that captures the absurdity of the creative writing process. 

When Storyteller lands on iOS and Android in September, it'll come with free DLC that offers new stories for players to weave. This extra content will come to Switch and PC at the same time, also for free.

The Netflix partnership makes sense for Storyteller and plenty of other indie games at the moment. Netflix is rapidly building up its roster of mobile games, all of which are free to play for anyone with a Netflix subscription, and it plans to have nearly 100 titles in its library by the end of the year. Already, Netflix has brought Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree, Spiritfarer, Into the Breach, Moonlighter, Laya's Horizon, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, and other notable names to iOS and Android. The company has even purchased a few renowned indie outfits outright, including the home of Oxenfree, Night School Studio.

Apple TV, yesterday on Twitter:

3 days until the #Silo finale.

Here’s the entire first episode.

Embedded right in that promoted tweet is the entire series premiere.¹

Putting aside, for this paragraph, the politics surrounding Twitter, this is a rather interesting promotional move. You can watch the premiere episodes for all Apple TV+ original series for free in the Apple TV app: Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance, The Morning Show, Hijack (the new thriller starring Idris Elba) — all of them. It’s an obvious strategy: get hooked on even one of these premieres and it costs just $7/month to watch the rest. The biggest obstacle to any streaming service is just getting someone to try it. Everyone with an iPhone or iPad or Mac already has Apple’s TV app installed, and a lot of people already have the app on their TVs or set top boxes. But Apple isn’t linking from Twitter to the TV+ app — they’ve shared the entire episode right on Twitter itself. Not YouTube, not Facebook. Twitter. That wasn’t even technically possible until last month.

But asking anyone today to put aside the politics of Twitter is a bit like the old “But other than that, how’d you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” joke. There is a number one user on Twitter, and that user is Elon Musk, and his politics and policies are veering more toxic, not less, as time goes on. Advertising is fundamentally about paying to reach an audience, not an endorsement of content, but at some level it’s a partnership. Publishers and platforms reject objectionable ads, and advertisers eschew objectionable platforms. Where is that line for Apple with Twitter?

Musk, unsurprisingly, seems exultant over Apple’s Silo promotion, which includes a custom hashflag icon. And here’s no less an influencer than MrBeast, Jimmy Donaldson, replying to Musk: “Really is a smart move, I never would have heard of this show and now I’m watching episode 1 and invested lol.” If you’re wondering why Apple would even consider continuing to advertise on Twitter, there’s your answer: the platform still has tremendous reach.

Apple spends a veritable fortune on advertising across a slew of media. But the only place where I see anyone asking “Why is Apple advertising there?” is Twitter. It’s hard not to think that Twitter, bereft of premium brand advertisers and looking to jumpstart its foray into hosting long-form video content, is getting more from this Silo promotion than Apple is getting from newfound viewers. It’s not the money (which Musk has plenty of), it’s the prestige (of which Twitter is by most accounts bankrupt). You can’t buy prestige, and Apple has chosen to bestow some on Twitter through this promotion. Is it outrageous that Apple continues to advertise on Twitter? I say no. But it feels a bit skeevy, and more than a little curious, that they choose to.

Mike Masnick, back in 2019:

I’ve argued for years that while many people like to say that content moderation is difficult, that’s misleading. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Importantly, this is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing. Nor is it an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts. But I do think there’s a huge problem in that many people — including many politicians and journalists — seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.

And thus, throwing humility to the wind, I’d like to propose Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, as a sort of play on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. More specifically, it will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population and will always fail to accurately represent the “proper” level of moderation of anyone. While I’m not going to go through the process of formalizing the theorem, a la Arrow’s, I’ll just note a few points on why the argument I’m making is inevitably true.

Billy Perrigo, reporting for Time:

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last month touring world capitals where, at talks to sold-out crowds and in meetings with heads of governments, he has repeatedly spoken of the need for global AI regulation.

But behind the scenes, OpenAI has lobbied for significant elements of the most comprehensive AI legislation in the world — the E.U.’s AI Act — to be watered down in ways that would reduce the regulatory burden on the company, according to documents about OpenAI’s engagement with E.U. officials obtained by Time from the European Commission via freedom of information requests.

I think concerns about the current state of AI are overwrought, and that regulation is not called for. But what Altman seems to be pushing for isn’t a hands-off approach from regulators — instead he just wants it enshrined in law that OpenAI and only OpenAI is exempt from regulations.

A very interesting and cogent paper leaked out of Google a few weeks ago, with the title “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”. The basic argument in the paper is that open-source AI will outcompete Google and OpenAI’s proprietary approaches. Ever since I read this leaked paper, it’s seemed clear to me that Sam Altman believes this as well, and so he’s been devoted to creating a regulatory moat to protect OpenAI.

Umar Shakir, writing for The Verge:

Apple’s revealing that its new Vision Pro mixed reality headset is outfitted with displays that have a 90Hz refresh rate. The new detail comes in an online WWDC session for developers where Apple shares how 2D video and stereoscopic 3D video work in the headset. [...]

The Vision Pro screens can also automatically switch to 96Hz, which is designed for playback of videos that are running at 24 frames per second, like most movies. There’s also support for both standard and high dynamic range (HDR) content.

From what I experienced, I figured it had to be at least 90 Hz. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it goes all the way to 120 Hz when needed, like Apple’s ProMotion displays for iPhone 14 Pro models.

People are (rightfully) losing their minds over the fact that Google has a built-in Katamari minigame that lets you roll everything on the page into a tidy ball that’d impress the King of the Cosmos.

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Science fiction writer Ted Chiang, in an interview with Madhumita Murgia for The Financial Times (Archive.is link):

Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.

“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

My puerile mind is tempted to make a joke that tacking on “system” would make for a fun acronym, but I shan’t crack that joke, as I think Chiang makes a strong point here. What we have with these LLMs isn’t low-level intelligence but rather high-level applied statistics that creates the powerful illusion of low-level intelligence.

See also: Chiang’s very short story “What’s Expected of Us”, referenced in the interview.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.” On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” [...]

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices — either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It’s downright spooky how this pamphlet from 80 years ago describes Trumpism and the MAGA movement to a T. Here’s the original pamphlet. (Via Kottke.)

Stephen Hackett, writing at 512 Pixels:

Photo Stream is one of the original components of iCloud, and was kept around even after iCloud Photo Library launched in 2014. Here’s how Apple pitched the feature when iCloud was new.

Michael Tsai:

You can see why they are consolidating on iCloud Photos, but Photo Stream had some appealing features that will be lost. First, you could backup/sync an unlimited amount of data (for a limited time). There was no need to worry about upgrading your account temporarily or having photo storage crowd out storage for other apps. Second, you could access recent photos and videos on all devices without having to store everything in the cloud.

It’s funny what gains traction for the long haul, and what turns out, in hindsight, to be a flash in the pan. I, for one, never would have predicted that WordPress would grow to become, by far, the most popular CMS in the world, and the foundation of a thriving company whose primary goal is making the web a better platform.

Speaking of Tapbots, here’s Andrew Logan writing for Texas Monthly:

Amir Shevat, Twitter’s former head of product for the developer platform, who lives in Round Rock, was responsible for ensuring that the tools Twitter provided independent software developers using the platform met their needs. He said about 17 percent of engagement on Twitter, historically, was through third-party apps, which played a vital role in defining Twitter’s identity.

To my knowledge no one at (or formerly at) Twitter has ever revealed that before. Obviously the overwhelming number of Twitter users only ever used Twitter’s own first-party clients. The reason third-party clients were so important to Twitter, though, is that Twitter power users were drawn to them.

Jardine said he has received positive feedback on the initial launch of Ivory, which he admits was released without all the features he wanted to include. Users being excited about his work is uplifting, he said. But that’s not what entirely motivates him. “Without [Ivory], we have no business,” Jardine said. “There’s a lot of pressure riding on it.”

Despite the pressure, Haddad seems to be thriving in this brave new world. “I’m not at the whims of a dictator anymore,” he said.

Amen to that.

Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic:

Twitter has so fully assumed the role of a far-right platform that it might be killing its competitors. When Parler shut down in April, its parent company noted that “no reasonable person believes that a Twitter clone just for conservatives is a viable business any more.” Left unspoken is the reason: Twitter has become a right-wing echo chamber.

If Musk weren’t too preoccupied lapping up approval from trolls, reactionaries, and Dogecoin enthusiasts — a few of the constituencies left on his site that still seem to adore him — the Parler statement should worry him. Right-wing alt-tech platforms may attract investors and a flood of indignant new users with persecution complexes, but they are, ultimately, bad businesses.

A fairer headline would be “Twitter Is a Far-Right-Friendly Social Network”, but that’s enough to be a problem.

I still check in on Twitter, but with each passing week, less and less. It’s not fun, it’s hard to use without Tweetbot, and the new algorithm that puts paying Twitter Blue users’ replies at the top of every thread has ruined political Twitter. It’s like letting people suffering from incontinence try on all the pants in a store before anyone else.

And the right-wing veer is most obvious in the ads that I see. (And I now see a lot of them — one every 3–4 posts.) Almost all of them are for no-name gimmicks and gadgets, the sort of crap that used to be sold at the mall at Spencer Gifts or in the middle of the night on cable TV commercials.

One of the few exceptions I see is Apple, which continues to place ads on Twitter.

Sigmund Judge, on Twitter:

Max launches today, and with it brings yet another chapter in the battle between Warner/Discovery executives and Apple TV customers.

@StreamOnMax switches away from Apple’s native video player in the continued pursuit of creating an inferior product...

I told you these Warner “Bros” Discovery executives are morons. On all the good platforms, you have to install an altogether new app. Why not just update the existing HBO Max app with (yet another) a new name and icon? Because they’re morons. (Even better: when I launch the old HBO Max app on my Apple TV, it doesn’t tell me anything about the new app — it just shows an error screen saying “Something went wrong.”)

This much moronity I expected. But it gets worse. As Judge documents, with the new app they’ve once again dropped tvOS’s excellent native video player for a custom video player that utterly sucks: “up next” support in the TV app is now broken or missing, HDR and frame-rate match are gone, the new video player doesn’t support the Siri remote’s jog support, no picture-in-picture, and no support for the wonderful “What did they just say?” feature (speak that to your Siri remote and the video jumps back 10 seconds or so and temporarily enables subtitles).

HBO Max was a really good tvOS app. Max is a poor one.

Lia Haberman, writing at ICYMI:

Codename: P92, Project 92 or Barcelona, as it’s been alternately called.

Tagline: “Instagram for your thoughts.”

All new details have surfaced based on secret calls Meta has been having with select creators, hinting at a potential release in late June. Here’s what I’ve been told by a creator who met with Meta.

The decentralized app is built on the back of Instagram but will be compatible with some other apps like Mastodon:

• There’s a single sign-on with your IG username and password
• You can sync up with your existing followers
• Your handle, bio and even verification will carry over from IG
• Users on other apps will be able search for, follow and interact with your profile and content

Sounds like it’s ActivityPub-compatible, which is how it will be possible to federate with Mastodon instances.

Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski, reporting for ProPublica:

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow. […]

“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch. […]

“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.

Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”

Just breathtaking corruption. And Thomas’s response is basically, “Fuck you.”

Blackbird, a new loyalty platform backed by Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal, is coming for New York restaurants

Consider the restaurant NFT: A digital asset few of us use and even fewer of us understand, sometimes ranging in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Like ancient talismans, they elicit a range of perks for their deep-pocketed owners, including priority reservations at the city’s hottest restaurants and entry to the Carbone at Hudson Yards, the more exclusive version of the original Carbone in Greenwich Village, which recently turned away Justin Bieber.

For a time, it seemed like most of us would never own a restaurant NFT. Now, all of us will, in theory.

Blackbird, a new restaurant loyalty program, pairs NFTs with VIP treatment, so even if you didn’t plan on owning a fancy digital asset this year, the company is banking on free food being enough to change your mind. The platform started this month at two New York restaurants, with several more to be trickled out in the coming weeks. Here’s the kicker: It comes from Ben Leventhal, one of the founders of Eater, who changed the way this city eats when he launched the reservation company Resy in 2014.

With Resy, Leventhal bet that diners wanted a better way to make online reservations — and won big. Blackbird is a different kind of gamble, that something as ethereal and sought-after as being a regular can be turned into an online object: A restaurant NFT.

“Blackbird is here to create meaningful connectivity between restaurants and their customers,” Leventhal wrote in a post on Substack earlier this month. “By connectivity, we mean direct connectivity, where guests know that the more they show up, the better their experience is going to be.” Leventhal declined to speak with Eater for this article.

At its core, Blackbird is a loyalty program for diners, who can track their trips to participating restaurants and earn rewards for repeat visits. Built on that platform is a toolkit that restaurant owners can use to collect data on their customers, crowdsource money from their most loyal fans, and more.

The company encourages customers to “check in” at restaurants by touching their phones to stickers placed at the entrances of restaurants and near their registers. They’re equipped with NFC chips — the same technology New Yorkers use to tap into the subway or purchase groceries with their phones.

Touching one for the first time prompts users to enter their name and phone number. After that, each tap counts as a check-in, and repeated visits to the same restaurant unlock rewards that are typically reserved for regulars, investors, and friends of the owners, such as complimentary appetizers and priority in booking reservations.

A customer’s status at a restaurant is saved on Blackbird’s website and app, which is still being built, in a digital “punch card,” also called an NFT. Each restaurant has its own card with a unique design that keeps track of a customer’s progress toward rewards. They can’t be exchanged between users, although Leventhal teased that people may be able to transfer the cards — that is, their status as regulars — down the line.

At Gertie, a modern Jewish diner in Williamsburg that launched on Blackbird earlier this month, customers who check in for the first time are given a free pastry. On their next visit to the restaurant, coffee is free. Over time, customers can collect other perks, like free bagel sandwiches (every five visits), invites to members-only events (after 10 check-ins), and a separate phone number for the host stand to make last-minute reservations (after 15).

“It works like a punch card at a coffee shop,” says Nate Adler, the restaurant’s owner. That’s the idea, at least. Even if customers are used to paying for meals and making reservations using their phones, checking in at a restaurant is virtually unheard of in New York City. According to Adler, only a couple of customers check in at Gertie using Blackbird each day. “There isn’t that habit yet,” he says.

Still, prominent restaurant owners are giving Blackbird a chance, in part because of Leventhal’s background as a co-founder of Resy, the start-up that took on OpenTable and won. “If anyone is going to pull this off, it’s Ben Leventhal,” says Nick Morgenstern, owner of Manhattan ice cream shop Morgenstern’s.

He signed on with the platform in March, ahead of opening Bananas, a vegan soft-serve shop that’s taking over the original location of Morgenstern’s on the Lower East Side. The business opens on May 1, but customers who pay $33.33 to become “members” can step inside today. “This isn’t to be exclusive,” according to Morgenstern, who says he’s using the money to cover payroll and food costs ahead of the full opening.

Members get one free soft serve a day during the preview period, which runs from April 20 to April 30. Once Bananas opens to the public, the shop will pivot to a loyalty program similar to the one at Gertie. “You want people to come back again and again,” Morgenstern says. “That’s the bread and butter of food service.”

The challenge ahead of Blackbird and its adopters is finding a way to make special treatment still feel special, even if everyone gets it. Take it from Twitter, which recently diluted its greatest asset, the blue check, by allowing bots to become verified for $8 a month.

Leventhal seemed to acknowledge this in a post on Substack earlier this month announcing Gertie’s launch on the platform. “For the restaurant industry to get loyalty right,” he wrote, “these programs have to be bespoke and organic.”

Disclosure: Ben Leventhal co-founded Eater in 2005.

Steve Streza, all the way back in February 2020 (innocent times, that month):

Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue. [...]

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Streza’s post emphasizes the new-user experience, and he’s right that longtime users (like you, dear reader, probably) don’t see a lot of this. But I do, because when reviewing new devices or new OS releases, I’ll sometimes set up as new (and use a spare Apple ID dedicated to testing) to see the factory-fresh Cupertino default experience. Is it too much advertising? I don’t know — but it’s a lot. One thing that’s clear is that Apple sees Music and TV as Apple-service properties. Yes, you can use them for listening to your own music and watching your own video files, but first and foremost these are client apps to Apple’s Music and TV+ services. These are not the iTunes and Video apps of yore.

But what got me thinking about this issue this week is the dumbest adware in iOS I’ve seen. For the last several weeks, I’ve noticed an ad in Settings on my iPhone, in the iCloud section at the very top of the first screen: “Apple Arcade Free for 3 Months”. The reason this is dumb is that I pay for a family account for Apple One, so we already have Apple Arcade. But here’s Apple badgering me to sign up for a 3-month free trial that I don’t need.

If I tap into that ad’s section in Settings it explains why they’re offering it: “Services Included With Purchase”. I’m not even sure what device I bought that earned me this offer, but it shouldn’t matter. Why are they showing me something I already pay for?

To be clear, I was able to make this ad go away by tapping “Not Now” on the offer screen in Settings. (I waited for weeks before doing so to see if it would go away on its own.) And I’m not blankly opposed to using this top-of-the-first-screen space in Settings to show offers for Apple’s services or AppleCare warranty coverage. But they ought to be presented conservatively, and with surgical precision. Apple is doing users a favor if they’re reminding them of offers — like three free months of Apple Arcade — that they’ve already qualified for with a hardware purchase. But it’s annoying and confusing that it’s the very app where I manage my Apple One subscription that’s suggesting I sign up for a service included in Apple One.

We — including Apple itself and Tim Cook personally — decry the invasiveness of the surveillance advertising complex, by which they develop profiles of us so accurate that the ads they deliver are so on-point to our recent interests that millions of people falsely believe their devices are somehow surreptitiously listening to their real-world conversations. This stupid Apple Arcade prompt in Settings is the opposite: I’m being shown it because Apple knows I recently bought a new device from them, but somehow doesn’t know that I already pay them for a subscription that includes Arcade. How can they be so contextually unaware?

Promotions for services I might want? Maybe, but Apple should be extremely conservative about presenting them — especially in push notifications. Promotions for services I already pay for? That shouldn’t happen.

Postscript, two weeks later: This bug was triggered by the fact that I’m an edge case, with separate Apple IDs for iCloud and for iTunes/App Store purchases.

Gabriel J.X. Dance, reporting for The New York Times (with informative graphics by Tim Wallace and Zach Levitt) on the Bitcoin mining industry:

It is as if another New York City’s worth of residences were now drawing on the nation’s power supply, The Times found.

In some areas, this has led prices to surge. In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has caused electric bills for power customers to rise nearly 5 percent, or $1.8 billion per year, according to a simulation performed for The Times by the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.

The additional power use across the country also causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to America’s roads, according to an analysis by WattTime, a nonprofit tech company. Many of the Bitcoin operations promote themselves as environmentally friendly and set up in areas rich with renewable energy, but their power needs are far too great to be satisfied by those sources alone. As a result, they have become a boon for the fossil fuel industry: WattTime found that coal and natural gas plants kick in to meet 85 percent of the demand these Bitcoin operations add to their grids.

The costs of Bitcoin seem clear: higher energy prices and more carbon emissions. Totally unclear: what we should, or even can, do about it.

Simon Aarons:

Introducing acropalypse: a serious privacy vulnerability in the Google Pixel’s inbuilt screenshot editing tool, Markup, enabling partial recovery of the original, unedited image data of a cropped and/or redacted screenshot. Huge thanks to @David3141593 for his help throughout!

David Buchanan:

The bug lies in closed-source Google-proprietary code so it’s a bit hard to inspect, but after some patch-diffing I concluded that the root cause was due to this horrible bit of API “design”: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/180526528.

Google was passing "w" to a call to parseMode(), when they should’ve been passing "wt" (the t stands for truncation). This is an easy mistake, since similar APIs (like POSIX fopen) will truncate by default when you simply pass "w". Not only that, but previous Android releases had parseMode("w") truncate by default too! This change wasn’t even documented until some time after the aforementioned bug report was made.

The end result is that the image file is opened without the O_TRUNC flag, so that when the cropped image is written, the original image is not truncated. If the new image file is smaller, the end of the original is left behind.

I ran a few cropped screenshots from my Pixel 4 running Android 13 through their proof-of-concept tool, and some of them revealed quite a bit of cropped-out content.

And it’s not just Android: Buchanan today discovered that Windows 11 and 10 have a similar bug.

2023 has already been a pretty solid year for games. However, if you stop and look at Metacritic to see what some of the highest-rated games released this year actually were, you’ll notice a trend: Many of them are remakes or remasters of older games. It’s a trend that likely has a few different causes, but which also…

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Michelle Boorstein and Heather Kelly, reporting for The Washington Post:

A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country. [...]

One report prepared for bishops says the group’s sources are data brokers who got the information from ad exchanges, which are sites where ads are bought and sold in real time, like a stock market. The group cross-referenced location data from the apps and other details with locations of church residences, workplaces and seminaries to find clergy who were allegedly active on the apps, according to one of the reports and also the audiotape of the group’s president.

Sherman said police departments have bought data about citizens instead of seeking a warrant, domestic abusers have accessed data about their victims, and antiabortion activists have used data to target people who visit clinics.

But Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, said the Burrill story was the first time he had heard of a private group buying commercial data and using it against a specific individual.

Makes me wonder how often this technique is being used to blackmail people. This group was targeting gay priests to out them; they could have just as easily blackmailed them.

An Overwatch 2 Twitch streamer got a big surprise when NBA star and Dallas Mavericks point guard Luka Doncic randomly ended up on his team. Doncic, an out and proud Overwatch player and, concerningly, Hanzo/Genji main, was playing Zarya in the grandmaster match, which streamer M0xy was beaming live to the Twitch…

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David Dayen, writing for The American Prospect:

The first words out of the mouth of Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) when I talked to her on Sunday were: “Can you believe we have to talk about this shit again?” She was referring to a conversation we had in 2018, when she was still just a financial expert and a candidate for Congress, about S.2155, which I call the Crapo bill, a reference to its co-author (Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo) and its underlying contents. [...]

The most important part of the Crapo bill was Section 401, which increased by fivefold the threshold for enhanced regulatory standards, from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO, Greg Becker, lobbied explicitly for this change. It meant that banks under $250 billion would not be subject to additional stress tests and heightened capital and liquidity requirements. SVB topped out around $200 billion, after growing rapidly in the past few years. [...]

So you have depositors that either didn’t know the first thing about risk management, or were bribed by the bank into neglecting it. And you have a bank that didn’t have a chief risk officer for close to a year, that put their entire risk management on autopilot and got blindsided by interest rate–fueled losses. “Interest rates do two things, they go up and down. SVB did not foresee and manage properly that inevitable thing,” Porter said.

Alex Sherman, reporting for CNBC:

WWE is in talks with state gambling regulators to legalize betting on high-profile matches, according to people familiar with the matter.

WWE is working with the accounting firm EY to secure scripted match results in hopes it will convince regulators there’s no chance of results leaking to the public, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Accounting firms PwC and EY, also known as Ernst & Young, have historically worked with award shows, including the Academy Awards and the Emmys, to keep results a secret.

Betting on the Academy Awards is already legal and available through some sports betting applications, including market leaders FanDuel and DraftKings, although most states don’t allow it. WWE executives have cited Oscars betting as a template to convince regulators gambling on scripted matches is safe, the people said.

The idea that any state might legalize betting on pro wrestling reminds me of this great bit from Vegas Vacation. Clark Griswold, down on his luck and down to his last few dollars, starts playing sketchy games in a sketchy casino — “Coin Toss”, “Rock Paper Scissors”, etc. He loses the last of his money at “Pick a Number” — you guess a number between 1 and 10, then the “dealer” tells you whether it’s the same number they were thinking of. I don’t see how betting on pro wrestling would be any different.

(Via Matt Levine, who quipped, “Oh man, I am so excited to write about this insider trading case in like a year.”)