Yeah, this one is late. I’m doing some extra work, OK? Anyway, onward.

1. Nerdy. Very nerdy

First something nerdy. Very nerdy. Of course, it’s from Howard Oakley, which is both the man who knows more about the Mac than anyone outside Cupertino and one of the world’s leading experts on cold weather survival and injury. Anyway, yes: ResEdit. If you’re old enough to remember the classic Mac, you’ll probably remember ResEdit, which let you tinker with all kinds of fun things from icons to menus. I miss ResEdit.

2. No, it’s not the fault of the EU that Microsoft hasn’t secured its kernel

Thank $DEITY$ for Paul Thurrott, who did what hundreds of other journalists couldn’t do and actually found what Microsoft was referring to when it claimed it had been forced by the European Commission to open up its kernel to third parties. This obvious bunk was swallowed and regurgitatd by the usual crowd of pundits who don’t believe big tech companies can be regulated, as well as a few who should have known better, but Paul did the work – and of course it turns out the EC did nothing of the sort. As Paul notes: “The EU didn’t force Microsoft to change Windows. It asked Microsoft to address the complaints it had raised, and this was only one of them. This change to Kernel Patch Protection was of Microsoft’s design…”

3. VCs are immoral, part 378

In particular, the odious duo of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who are basically backing Donald Trump so they can pay less tax – and screw everyone who will suffer, and screw America sliding into a dictatorship. It’s great to see sites like The Verge giving them the kicking they deserve.

4. Unpersons

This is your obligatory regular missive on the general brilliance of Cory Doctorow, and this week it’s all about what happens when big tech companies pull the rug out from your lives. In this case, it’s Google, but it could equally be Microsoft, or Apple.

5. Ritual de lo Habitual

I’m a little bit astounded that Jane’s Addiction’s fantastic Ritual de lo Habitual is THIRTY FOUR YEARS OLD. This interview with Casey Niccoli, who made the artwork for the cover (and without whom JA wouldn’t have been JA) brought a lot of that era back. Also Perry Farrell is clearly an ass.

6. And speaking of asses

Elon Musk.

7. And speaking of Nazis

This is a wonderful essay-length piece reflecting on the author’s family and their ties to Nazism, about which they were not even vaguely ashamed or repentant.

8. And speaking of Nazi sea-monkeys

No really. Like lots of British kids who read American comics, I was obsessed with Sea-Monkeys, not realising of course they were just shrimp. What I didn’t know what that their inventor was a Nazi who once said “Hitler wasn’t a bad guy, he just received bad press.”

9. Surprise and delight

One of the things I have been pondering of late the sorry state of user interfaces. There seems to be remarkably little thinking going on in artistic terms. This video of Susan Kare demonstrating original Mac user interface really got me thinking about it, because the Mac user interface was packed full of delightful little elements. I wonder why we don’t often see that now?

10. Of course they are doing this. Of course they are

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that Anthropic, yet another AI start-up, are scraping data and completely ignoring robots.txt files in order to do it. Now, I am not a copyright absolutist, but one thing that a couple of decades of publishing has taught me is there’s no blanket right to suck all the data on the internet into a vast machine while offering nothing in return.

1. Oh come on, Apple

Back when Apple changed its app guidelines to permit emulators and HTML 5-based mini games it looked like the dawning of just a little bit of light in Cupertino. Completely coincidentally these changes were made just before the DOJ case at which this kind of restriction was central. And weirdly, it looks like Apple is now walking those changes back — without, of course, putting that in writing.

When Sticky was rejected on the basis of Rule 4.7, the company appealed. Cue a call with someone from Apple:

"In our case, after the appeal, we were called up by someone from Apple who started the call saying they did not consent to it being recorded (how’s that for inspiring trust?), who walked-back what they had said about HTML5 (and of course they did not put that in writing in the message they sent afterwards), but then came up with a couple of brand-new reasons for keeping our update off the store: claiming that we had changed the app concept… because our app was different some 4 years ago and hundreds of updates ago when it started! And including mentioning rule 4.7 regarding emulators… which we are not and do not claim to be!"

2. It’s all about the user experience

Unless you have an ad blocker in place you will be very familiar with the contextual advertising from Taboola. Those blocks at the bottom of web pages listing amazing hair loss treatments and cheap junk? That’s Taboola. Now you can argue that those ads are junk because people click on them (and there’s something to that), but junk they are.

They do, though, make publishers a lot of money — and now Apple wants a chunk of that money, and has struck a deal with Taboola to become an advertising partner on Apple News. Om Malik has had enough. I’m not one to pull the "this would never have happened in Steve’s day" card, but really, Jobs had taste: there’s zero chance he would have got into bed with Taboola for a few billion dollars.

3. The objects of our life

And if you don’t believe, that, I recommend watching the video that’s just been found and released by the Steve Jobs Archive. It’s Steve’s talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen, and it’s a great watch. For all his faults, the man had taste.

4. Eazel come, Eazel go

There was a point towards the end of the 90s when I began to believe that desktop Linux really was the future. Yes, I know. But one of the things which persuaded me was Eazel, a startup which included legendary Apple people like Andy Hertzfeld, Mick Boich and Susan Kare, who were aiming to create a user interface for Linux which did not suck. Eazel didn’t last, but its product did: if you use GNOME today, you’re looking at something which started life as Eazel’s Nautilus file manager. I very much wish it still had Susan’s icons in it. Apple rehired a bunch of Eazel employees, so if you’re using macOS, you are also seeing something with Eazel DNA.

5. Return to office is a failure

Of course, it depends on what kind of work you do, but for millions of office workers around the world the one good outcome of the pandemic has been more working from home. Home working has many advantages, particularly for mid-career workers (less so for younger ones) but finally Gartner has come out and done some really interesting and in-depth research. High performing employees, in particular, hate return to office mandates because they prize flexibility and see them as a sign of distrust by managers. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you can’t manage remote workers, that’s your problem not theirs.

6. Google is mind-bogglingly bad

So says Om, and I have to agree: in terms of product design, Google has got a lot worse over the last few years.

7. "Privacy preserving" Lololollol

There’s a bit of a brouhaha because both Firefox and Safari have added a default-on "privacy preserving ad tracking" feature, which anonymously measures ad clicks at the browser level and passes that on to advertising companies. It’s not a big deal for me — I block ads at the DNS level, so don’t see them to click on them — but it’s made a lot of people unhappy.

8. Calling for civil war is, apparently "controversial"

And now for some awful people. I had never heard of this guy before he started shooting his mouth off, but apparently he’s some kind of crypto big cheese, which already tells me a lot. But what made me laugh is the headline, which refers to his comments as "controversial". Apparently, calling for civil war, calling for anyone not voting for Trump to "die in a fire", alluding positively to a conspiracy theory that the guy who shot Trump was related to Elizabeth Warren… these things are all "controversial". Not "violent", "traitorous", "racist"… oh no, those words are going too far!

9. This is where it was always going

Elon Musk has decided that he owns Twitter, so he can use it for whatever he wants. An object lesson why platforms should not be owned by billionaires.

10. Return of the underdogs

One thing Apple does extremely well is advertising, and my favourite ads of the last few years have been the ones that focus on The Underdogs – I find them incredibly funny and charming, and a bit of light relief from all the travails of tech. Enjoy.

1. Couldn’t happen to a nicer billionaire

What’s interesting about the European Commission’s charges against Twitter (which I refuse to call X because it’s a stupid name) is the focus on the blue checks’ policy. Everyone knew this was a bad idea driven solely by Musk’s hatred of anyone more fascinating than him. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost – at a cost of up to 6% of the company’s global revenue.

2. The end of the cheap money era

If you’re a football fan, you might know the name Clearlake Capital for its ownership of Chelsea – and the fact that it’s spent getting on for £1bn on players. All that money has to come from somewhere and like all private equity companies, Clearlake has piled a lot of debt on to its companies. The era of cheap money is over, so it’s finding it harder to follow the same model.  

3. The toxic nature of the OpenAI board seat

Not that long ago, Microsoft was proudly talking about its “observer” seat on the OpenAI board. Now it’s decided it’s “no longer necessary”. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that both the EU and US authorities have been looking at the relationship between the two companies with interest. The tech pundits will be along to tell us how this is stifling innovation or some such real soon now.

4. And speaking of private equity

Charlie Mullins, who sold Pimlico Plumbers to a private equity company, now has regrets. I’m not surprised: the private equity model is based on “efficiencies”, which can be translated as “worse services”, and Pimlico became successful because of its customer service. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the PE companies: they can always flip the business to some other sucker further down the line, after they have drained it through special dividends.  

5. Little tech (not to be confused with small tech)

Techno-optimism is so last week. Now, the odious Andreessen is promoting the idea of “little tech” which, of course, means the kind of startups that A16Z invests in. And of course, there’s no need for those companies to actually grow: the aim is to flip them to one of the big tech firms before the need to make a profit actually arrives. I’m actually glad that the thing which some smart analysts once told me didn’t happen – VC companies investing in businesses solely to flip them – is now a part of the business they’re happy to admit is the goal.

6. AI slop

Christina Warren noticed something odd: her byline was appearing against articles which she hadn’t written. It turns out that TUAW, which she used to write for a good decade and a bit ago, had been acquired by the kind of company which churns out AI-generated crap content, and they had been using the bylines of people who used to work there. Related: I have no idea who owns some of the domains I used to work on, including macuser.co.uk, which doesn’t appear to have moved to Future alongside the old print product.

7. Piracy is back, baby

Wendy Grossman – who has been writing a weekly column on the internet for longer than some of you have been alive – has written an excellent piece on the second coming of internet piracy. As Wendy notes, the emergence of piracy as a more mainstream activity comes at the same moment that streaming services have started to get pricier and worse. The removal of decades of Comedy Central clips is teaching a new generation that you can’t trust content will remain online. There is a reason I have a couple of 4Tb drives attached to a local machine, kids.

8. RIP Bruce

I missed that Bruce Bastien had died. Before Microsoft used tying, bundling and other illegal behaviour to destroy all its competitors in the 1990s, I used WordPerfect rather than Word, and it still offers features which you can’t get anywhere else. Technically, it still exists, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Related: I’m amazed to find you can still buy Quattro Pro too.

9. Switching

You can now easily transfer your images from iCloud to Google Photos. Why would you want to do that? Because if you have many images stored only in Apple’s cloud, downloading them all and then exporting using the Photos app is a horrible experience. Unless you like watching Photos’ memory usage balloon to more than 64Gb and then take down your whole system, of course. Google Photos, on the other hand, lets you download them all from the browser thanks to Google Takeout.

10. No politics allowed

When big tech platforms talk about not allowing political speech, what they almost always mean is “no political speech we don’t like”. And when Meta says it about Threads, what it means is “no marginalised people here, please.” Kudos to MacStories for publishing this.

1. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you

Surprise! The use of energy-intensive AI to make stupid graphics that look instantly like AI and write words that it would take you five minutes to right have pushed Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions up by 30% since 2020 and Google’s up 48% since 2019. But it’s OK, Google’s energy usage is only 0.1% of the entire planet’s, it’s not like it’s much… there’s more on this in Paris Marx’s article, which is a good read too.

2. Destructive investment

Related to this of course is the entire system of investment, which focuses — at least in the US — on the primacy of shareholder interests over those of the country. This system has led directly to a lot of terrible outcomes, from Apple’s “growth at all costs” approach to abusing its power in the market through to, well, Elon Musk. The same dynamic is gradually seeing many of our most valuable institutions fall into the hands of private equity companies, a group for whom the phrase “vulture capitalism” was virtually invented. And much of this delusional behaviour is, unfortunately, driven by myths about early tech companies, from the startup-in-garage to the founders-as-heroes. I have to confess that I, too, once believed in these myths. I no longer do.

3. When Apple says protecting users, it means protecting profits

A single app store and an operating system which doesn’t let you install the apps you choose is a single point for any government to control your experience. That’s one of the reasons why battles to prevent Apple and others having a monopoly on software installation is important. Apple’s desire to “own” software distribution is not about protecting users: it’s about protecting profits. Case in point: the company has bowed to pressure from the Russian government and removed a number of VPNs, which allow Russians to bypass state censorship, from the App Store. If Apple allowed sideloading, which it easily could, this would not be a big deal. But it would rather adopt the “principle” that users aren’t allowed to install software from anywhere they want rather than oppose state surveillance.

4.Apple “crippled watchOS to lock out competitors”

When Apple changed its heart monitoring APIs in watchOS 5, it’s claimed, it did so to ensure third-party competitors didn’t get access to the same data its own apps had. I don’t know if this is true, but even if it’s not, it’s another example of why platform owners like Apple need to be made to ensure a level playing field if innovation is to thrive.

5.Apple (Computer) Says no

Want to run DOS on your iPhone or iPad? Apple says you can’t. Why not? Because Apple says so. Just because you paid Apple £1000 for your iPhone doesn’t mean you get to install things you want. It’s not like you own it or anything. What makes this even worse is that notarisation should be a system which is used solely to stop malware. In practice, Apple is simply using it to enforce its app store rules outside the app store — which discredits the whole purpose of notarisation.

6.Nerd History heaven

How well I remember the process of juggling INITs and CDEVs. As always, Howard has the details.

7. Meanwhile, In Microsoft land

Now if you’re thinking about maybe ditching your Apple products and exchanging them for one of those fancy new Copilot + PCs, you might want to reconsider. Microsoft is going through one of its periodic seasons of hand-wringing about security, while, of course, adding in insecure features by design. Everything that Microsoft is currently doing to Windows is aiming towards a single goal: to make sure you can’t use Windows without connecting to a Microsoft account, and ensuring it has access to your data. Case in point: the New Outlook, which the company has been prodding users towards for a while. Unlike the old bundled Mail app, which used IMAP or POP, new Outlook only talks to Microsoft’s servers: to use it with a non-Microsoft account you have to give Microsoft access to all your third-party email. Oh, and don’t think you can use it without also having Edge installed. Not doubt, if questioned, it would claim this is all for “security” or “the benefit of users”. A plague on all their houses.

8.Proton Changes

Proton, everyone’s favourite bunch of Swiss-based nerds, is going to move towards a non-profit structure. This is a good thing. Owned by a Swiss non-profit foundation, the company can’t be as easily taken over — and the foundation itself is legally obligated to act in a way which supports its original mission.

9. Docs, docs and more docs

And speaking of Proton, they launched their own collaborative cloud-based document system. It seems like a pretty private system: everything is encrypted end-to-end, and no data is collected that isn’t necessary to make the thing work.

10.Sixteen Kids and a hitman

Away from the world of technology for the last couple of pieces. This story of an evangelical man who went on to the dark net to hire a hitman to have the biological parents of his adopted children murdered is quite the thing.

1. Oh Perplexity, why must you test me so?

I have been a big proponent of Perplexity for a while, mostly because I found it incredibly useful as a research tool. Turns out the reason it was useful as a research tool was it was scraping a load of data that it shouldn’t, pretending to be academic researchers to get access to Twitter, and more. Suffice to say, I no longer recommend it. But more than that: organisations which engage in this kind of perfidious conduct should be actively shunned.

2. The cows are lying down

And speaking of AI, 404 Media decided to conduct an experiment: how much would it cost to basically clone their site using LLMs and off-the shelf tools? The answer: $365.63. And they wouldn’t have to employ any of those pesky journalists to do it.

3. Better by you…

What was the internet like 20 years ago? Without coming across like an old git, the answer is just “better”. Like Richard, I started blogging using Radio Userland, a long-forgotten application developed by Dave Winer. Like everything Winer makes, it was really an outliner (when I first worked at Apple in 1989, we used MORE for presentations – it was also a Winer product, and also really an outliner). It was also local: it generated all the HTML for your blog on your Mac and then uploaded the changed files. I still there there’s something in that approach.

4. Are you though? Are you really?

Ever wondered what it’s like being a low-ranking professional tennis player? No, I hadn’t either — but this great piece in The Guardian had me laughing, then shaking my head, then laughing again. My favourite line: ““I am going to fight my natural hand-to-eye coordination, no matter how bad it is, I am going to hit all of these motherfucking balls until I develop a shot. I am going to do this for months and months and months: I am not going to let these rich fucks beat me.”

5. Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law

Confession time: whenever I buy an ebook which is encumbered with DRM, I crack it and save a local copy. I don’t give it away, loan it, upload it anywhere — but I don’t trust companies to keep their unspoken promise that I will always be able to access that book. Why don’t I trust them to? Here’s why. And yes, I did have books which used this DRM system.

6. And speaking of Microsoft DRM systems

Oops. Repeat after me: DRM is pointless.

7. Creative destruction

Look, in the great long list of terrible things that the Tories have spent fourteen years doing to Britain, the effective destruction of much of the support for the arts that had been built up for decades may not seem like the worst. But in terms of the breadth of people it affects, it’s probably the broadest. Obviously, underfunding organisations and forcing them to spend more time chasing money than supporting creative work is bad. But they have also hammered funding for adult education cources which aren’t “vocational”, which means that drawing, painting and other creative practice classes are not being cut – something disproportionately affects older people. Capitalism hates creativity.

8. PRs: please don’t do this

I don’t get that many unsolicited press releases these days (don’t think of this as a request) and I doubt that even during the Journalism Peak of my career I got as many as Jay Rayner, but I completely sympathise with his public letter asking that PRs do at least the minimum amount of research before sending him stuff.

9. The grumpiest man from Wales is back

God I love John Cale. Way back in the first years of this century I was lucky enough to see him do readings from his book What’s Welsh for Zen? at Komedia in Brighton, and he almost bit the head off an audience member who was trying to video him. In the twenty four years since he’s just got grumpier and he remains a vital creative force. I adore him.

10. The best reason not to use AI

We really do not need another global power crisis while we’re trying to stop the planet burning.

1. Dell to employees: “screw you”. Employees to Dell: “you first”

Everyone enjoys seeing a few chickens coming home to roost, and especially when the chickens are landing on the roof of a huge corporate entity and crapping all over its well-manicured rooftop executive garden. The latest to find out the hard way is Dell, which ordered its employees to make a choice: become “hybrid” workers travelling to an office 39 times a year (monitored of course) to spend their time on Zoom calls from an empty office, or be “remote” workers. Oh, and if you’re remote, you’re not allowed to get promoted or apply for another role in the company, ever.

No doubt the conversation in the executive suite was about how remote workers weren’t “team players” and so weren’t the kind of people who “deserved” promotion, no matter how well they actually do their job. But it’s turned out that if you choose to wield the stick rather than the carrot, people don’t respond too well: in fact, nearly 50% of employees have chosen collectively to shrug their shoulders and stay at home.

That’s bad enough now, but it’s also really going to choke Dell as a business in the future. Retention is always an issue, and the retention of employees who have no prospects in a company is an almost impossible task. Any competent leader at Dell will be spending a lot of their time in the next year recruiting, while good employees go elsewhere to further their career in remote roles.

And failing to retain costs money: way back in my early career, a slightly drunk finance director told me that when you accounted for the time of managers recruiting, the effort to find someone good, and short-term costs of backfilling vacant roles, you were basically burning about £2000 every time you recruited a replacement. The cost to Dell of increasing employee churn, with around 120,000 employees, is a lot: if this move adds another 5% to its churn rate, it runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.

And for what? Because Michael Dell likes to see a “lively” office? Michael, the 1990s called, and they would like their ideas about business back.

2. It was 20 years ago today…

How can it be 20 years since Cory Doctorow travelled from London to Redmond and into the belly of the beast to deliver the good news that DRM doesn’t work? Cory was right: DRM doesn’t work, and it never has. But the tech companies have managed to use its spiritual successors likes parts pairing and app stores, enabled by exploiting the intersection between bad law and technology, to do things which would have sounded wild to them in 2004. Had Bill Gates thought about a software store on Windows that he got 30% of the cut from for no additional work, he would have probably drooled so much the hydration would have killed him.

3. And the bullshit machine goes marching on

I have to confess that I was pretty enthusiastic about Perplexity, which I’ve used as an example of how a large language model-based tool could actually improve on the existing state of the art. And I still believe that search, in the way we think of it now, is going away and will be replaced by conversational engines giving answers that tap into public data. You shouldn’t have to master how to use a search engine (or the frankly shitty experience that most SEO-led pages now deliver) to find what you want. And where you don’t quite know exactly what you want – such as when you’re buying a product – having a conversation with something that knows about products is a better way to do it.

But oh: it turns out that Perplexity not only just makes stuff up, it has been scraping data it shouldn’t have and trying to cover its tracks. Why are startup people, so often, utter shitheads about stuff like this? It’s just so unnecessary.

4. $325m worth of humans delivering pizza

I absolutely love Joan Westenberg’s writing, and this piece on Zume is a perfect example of how she cuts through the bullshit. Zume, in case you missed their flashy pitch, was going to revolutionise food delivery by cooking the food in ovens on route to you. It started with pizza, but, of course, had the stink of “disruption” about it, the kind of smell that always ends up spreading to a thousand other areas. It turned out, of course, that its magic robot roving ovens made pizza that was just bad – so they ended up having stationary “mobile” ovens and using human delivery drivers to actually take the product to the customer.

In other words, VC’s decided that a company of pizza vans was worth $2.25 billion.

Masters of the universe, my ass.

5. Here we go again

Governments really, really, really hate encrypted messaging. The “good” governments hate it because they think it aids criminals; the bad ones hate it because it aids dissidents. And just because we beat them once, doesn’t mean they’re not going to try it again. Meanwhile, you can find me on Signal.

6. But muh users!

I see that Apple is up to its bullshit again? A terrible shame that it’s not going to get its way.

7. AI is a feature, not a platform, not a product

I’ve seen a few articles floating around about how Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” announcements shows that AI is a feature, not a product or platform (Benedict Evans has written a good one) and there is definitely something to this. But it’s worth remembering that the canonical use of “feature not product” was Steve Jobs telling this to Dropbox. And somehow, Dropbox is not only still around, it’s a good product – and still better than anything Apple has developed. What Apple has done is great: but in terms of the future, general purpose intelligence will probably win out for many tasks. Just because automatic gearboxes exist doesn’t mean sometimes a manual shift isn’t the right option.

8. Developers? Before the app store? THIS CANNOT BE

Someone should tell Tim Cook that a reality distortion field only works if you have the charisma of Steve Jobs.

9. Meanwhile, in Keir Starmer’s inbox…

…will be the terrible state of the universities, several of whom are likely to go bust within the first year of a Labour administration. Lots to do, boss, lots to do.

10. Masters of the universe, Redux

Every day, there’s another piece of evidence suggesting that far from being the Übermensch of their dreams, masters of the universe, probably lords of time, venture capitalists are really quite dumb. You have to love it.