By John Gruber

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Figma AI Is a Rip-Off Engine ★

Andy Allen:

Figma AI looks rather heavily trained on existing apps.

This is a “weather app” using the new Make Designs feature and the results are basically Apple’s Weather app (left). Tried three times, same results.

This is even more disgraceful than a human rip-off. Figma knows what they trained this thing on, and they know what it outputs. In the case of this utter, shameless, abject rip-off of Apple Weather, they’re even copying Weather’s semi-inscrutable (semi-scrutable?) daily temperature range bars.

“AI” didn’t do this. Figma did this. And they’re handing this feature to designers who trust Figma and are the ones who are going to be on the hook when they present a design that, unbeknownst to them, is a blatant rip-off of some existing app.

Maybe now that the Adobe deal fell through, Figma is looking to sell itself to Samsung?

Sunday, 30 June 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Curiously Short Episodes’ ★

John Moltz returns to the show for a holiday-week look at the best of recent prestige streaming content, particularly Apple TV+. And, yes, a bit on the latest Apple/EU/DMA drama.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. Start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. Ship complex features like SSO and SCIM (pronounced skim) provisioning in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.

For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Thursday, 27 June 2024

European Commission Launches Investigation Against Microsoft for Integrating Teams With Office ★

The European Commission:

In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings. The conduct may have prevented Teams’ rivals from competing, and in turn innovating, to the detriment of customers in the European Economic Area.

If confirmed, these practices would infringe Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (‘TFEU’), which prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position.

After the Commission opened proceedings in July 2023, Microsoft introduced changes in the way it distributes Teams. In particular, Microsoft started offering some suites without Teams. The Commission preliminarily finds that these changes are insufficient to address its concerns and that more changes to Microsoft’s conduct are necessary to restore competition.

I can see the argument from regulatory proponents, that unbundling Teams from Office in some packages, after the fact, is too little too late. That the damage from abusing their dominant position was already done. But still, what more does the EC want?

The sending of a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the outcome of an investigation.

Translation: They’re guilty and we’re just going through the motions of giving them a chance to state their case.

If the Commission concludes, after the company has exercised its rights of defence, that there is sufficient evidence of an infringement, it can adopt a decision prohibiting the conduct and imposing a fine of up to 10% of the company’s annual worldwide turnover. The Commission may also impose on the company any remedies which are proportionate to bring the infringement effectively to an end.

My read on this is that the EC’s stance is that its designated gatekeeping companies — all of which happen, by sheer coincidence I’m repeatedly told, to be from the US or Asia — should be forbidden from evolving their platforms to stay on top. That churn should be mandated by law.

I mean of course Microsoft had an advantage by being able to bundle Teams with Office. But Office needs something like Teams to remain relevant today. If Office had never evolved after achieving a dominant position in the market, it would still be sold in boxes full of floppy disks. Moving from licensed installations to SaaS was inevitable if Office was to remain relevant, and adding a collaborative communication layer like Teams was essential in today’s world.

The EC, to my eyes, is saying that it’s illegal for a successful platform to adapt and evolve. Or at the very least they’re saying they might deem it illegal. And once again it’s the EC itself that is proclaiming its threat to fine Microsoft up to 10 percent of its annual global revenue, and I’ll wager, once again, that the EU itself comprises less than 10 percent of Microsoft’s revenue. They’re threatening fines incommensurate with their market size.

I think the EC expects these companies to capitulate. To bend their entire global strategy to the whims of EC bureaucrats, and just accept being handcuffed. But what’s clearly happening is that the these gatekeepers are reading the writing on the wall, and are going to postpone all new features and products in the EU until after they have assurances that they’re compliant under EU law. The EC thinks they’re going to handcuff these companies, but instead all they’re doing is setting the entire EU market months, or even years, behind the rest of the world for new products and services. In some cases those products and services will just never come to the EU at all.

Surely the lesson Microsoft is taking from this is not that they were wrong to bundle Teams with Office, but that they were wrong to offer their integrated service in the EU.

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball and the Talk Show, Summer 2024 Edition ★

Yours truly back in March:

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

This is now true, once again for next week. And just like in March, sponsorship spots for The Talk Show are open for the summer months as well.

Wednesday, 26 June 2024

The Talk Show: ‘150 Million Calculator Apps’ ★

Quinn Nelson, esteemed host of Snazzy Labs, returns to the show to recap the highlights of WWDC: Apple Intelligence, platform updates, and the latest salvos from the EC regarding Apple’s compliance with the DMA.

Sponsored by:

• Trade Coffee: Enjoy 30% off your first month of coffee.
• Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.

Wavelength Is Shutting Down at the End of July ★

Wavelength:

We’re sad to announce that we’re shutting down Wavelength. We’re so grateful to our users and community — you’ve been amazing.

On July 31st we’ll turn off our servers, which means that you’ll no longer be able to sign in, create a group, or send messages. You will continue to have access to your message history as long as you keep the app installed on your device, but we recommend saving or copying anything important out of the app as soon as you can.

Your Wavelength account data will be deleted from our servers at the time of the shutdown. Rest assured that we will not retain, sell, or transfer any user information, and that your messages remain end-to-end encrypted and secure.

You may recall I’ve been an advisor to the team at Wavelength for a little over a year, so I knew this announcement was coming. It’s a bummer, personally, at two levels. First, just knowing the team, particularly cofounders Richard Henry and Marc Bodnick, both of whom I now consider friends. They tried to crack the “privacy-minded social network” nut before with Telepath, and with Wavelength got even closer to pulling it off. So much work went into it, and so much of it was so good.

Second, though, is a more selfish reason: I’m an active participant in a bunch of active, vibrant groups on Wavelength. I’m going to miss them. The groups I’m most active in on Wavelength have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than any social networking platform I’ve seen in ages. I’d have to go back to the heyday of Usenet and email group mailing lists, literally decades ago, or the very early years of Twitter, to find anything with such a high level of discourse.

But the simple truth is that while Wavelength has been far from a failure, it’s also far from a breakout hit. It’d be an easy decision to shut it down if it were a flop. It was a hard decision to shut it down because it wasn’t. But a social platform really needs to be a breakout hit to succeed, and Wavelength just wasn’t on a path to become one.

So: time to move on. Until the plug gets pulled at the end of next month though, I’ll still be there.

Tuesday, 25 June 2024

Microsoft Edge Has an ‘Enhanced Security’ Mode That Disables the JIT ★

Sergiu Gatlan, writing for Bleeping Computer in 2021 (thanks to Kevin van Haaren):

Microsoft has announced that the Edge Vulnerability Research team is experimenting with a new feature dubbed “Super Duper Secure Mode” and designed to bring security improvements without significant performance losses. When enabled, the new Microsoft Edge Super Duper Secure Mode will remove Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT) from the V8 processing pipeline, reducing the attack surface threat actors can use to hack into Edge users’ systems.

Based on CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) data collected since 2019, around 45% of vulnerabilities found in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine were related to the JIT engine, more than half of all “in the wild” Chrome exploits abusing JIT bugs.

“Super Duper Secure Mode” was a funner name, but they settled on “Enhanced Security Mode”.

This is why Apple considers BrowserEngineKit — which is complex and requires a special entitlement with stringent requirements to use — necessary for complying with the DMA’s mandate to allow third-party browser engines. JITs are inherently vulnerable. It’s not about known bugs — it’s the unknown bugs.

The anti-WebKit peanut gallery responded to my piece on JITs yesterday with a collective response along the lines of “Who’s to say WebKit’s JIT is any more secure than Chrome’s or Gecko’s?” That’s not really the point, but that answer is, Apple is to say. iOS is their platform and they’ve decided that it’s better for the platform to reduce the attack surface to a single browser engine, WebKit, the one they themselves control. And Apple isn’t saying WebKit as a whole, or its JavaScript JIT compiler in particular, is more secure than Chrome or Gecko. They’re saying, implicitly, that it’s safer to have just one that they themselves are fully responsible for. And that the safest way to comply with the DMA’s mandate to allow third-party rendering engines is via a stringent framework like BrowserEngineKit.

You might think it would be just fine for iOS to work just like MacOS, where you can install whatever software you want. But Apple, expressly, does not. iOS is designed to be significantly more secure than MacOS.

Reuters: Amazon Is Considering $5 Monthly Charge for Improved Alexa ★

Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:

Amazon is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.

Known internally as “Banyan,” a reference to the sprawling ficus trees, the project would represent the first major overhaul of the voice assistant since it was introduced in 2014 along with the Echo line of speakers. Amazon has dubbed the new voice assistant “Remarkable Alexa,” the people said.

A bit of a role reversal here. Apple, which is not known for giving away much for free, isn’t charging users for Apple Intelligence, including ChatGPT integration. Amazon, which is known for ruthlessly pursuing low prices, is, according to this report, looking to charge for an LLM-powered version of Alexa. Maybe that new version of Alexa really is that good? But I sort of think that if they gate this new Alexa behind a paywall, it will just be added to the existing package for Prime.

Speaking of Alexa, though, I’m reminded that Apple’s WWDC announcements didn’t include anything about bringing the new Apple-Intelligence-powered Siri to devices like HomePods or Apple Watches. Let’s say you have an iPhone 15 Pro or buy a new iPhone 16 this fall. What happens when you talk to Siri through your Apple Watch? Do you get the new Apple Intelligence Siri, because your watch is paired to your iPhone, which meets the device requirements for Apple Intelligence? Or do you get old dumb Siri on your Watch and only get new Siri when talking directly to your iPhone?

Gurman Just Pantsed the WSJ on Their Report About Apple and Meta Working on an AI Deal ★

Salvador Rodriguez, Aaron Tilley, Miles Kruppa, reporting for The Wall Street Journal Sunday morning (News+):

In its hustle to catch up on AI, Apple has been talking with a longtime rival: Meta. Facebook’s parent has held discussions with Apple about integrating Meta Platforms’ generative AI model into Apple Intelligence, the recently announced AI system for iPhones and other devices, according to people familiar with the matter.

This didn’t make much sense, given Tim Cook’s strident condemnation of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. E.g. this interview with Kara Swisher, which, though it was six years ago, doesn’t leave much room for a strange bedfellows partnership today: “Asked by Swisher what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s position, Cook said pointedly: ‘I wouldn’t be in this situation.’” Cook and Apple’s entire problem with Meta is their approach to privacy and monetizing through targeted advertising based on user profiles. Apple is trying to convince customers that Apple’s approach to AI is completely private and trustworthy; a partnership with Meta would run counter to that. And, quite frankly, Meta’s AI technology is not enviable.

Now here’s Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg yesterday evening (News+):

Apple Inc. rejected overtures by Meta Platforms Inc. to integrate the social networking company’s AI chatbot into the iPhone months ago, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The two companies aren’t in discussions about using Meta’s Llama chatbot in an AI partnership and only held brief talks in March, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private. The dialogue about a partnership didn’t reach any formal stage, and Apple has no active plans to integrate Llama. [...]

Apple decided not to move forward with formal Meta discussions in part because it doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough, according to the people. Apple has spent years criticizing Meta’s technology, and integrating Llama into the iPhone would have been a stark about-face.

Spokespeople for Apple and Meta declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the two companies were in talks about an AI partnership.

Delicious, right down to the fact that Bloomberg’s link on “reported on Sunday” points not to the Journal but to Bloomberg’s own regurgitation of the WSJ’s report.

Monday, 24 June 2024

European Commission Dings Apple Over Anti-Steering Provisions in App Store, and Opens New Investigations Into Core Technology Fee, Sideloading Protections, and the Eligibility Requirements to Offer an Alternative Marketplace ★

The European Commission:

Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content.

I think what they’re saying here is that Apple’s current compliance offering, where developers can remain exclusively in the App Store in the EU under the existing terms, or choose the new terms that allow for linking out to the web, aren’t going to pass muster. The EC wants all apps to be able to freely — as in free of charge freely — link out to the web for purchases, regardless of whether they’re from the App Store, an alternative marketplace, or directly sideloaded.

The Commission will investigate whether these new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores breach Article 6(4) of the DMA and notably the necessity and proportionality requirements provided therein. This includes:

1. Apple’s Core Technology Fee, under which developers of third-party app stores and third-party apps must pay a €0.50 fee per installed app. The Commission will investigate whether Apple has demonstrated that the fee structure that it has imposed, as part of the new business terms, and in particular the Core Technology Fee, effectively complies with the DMA.

No word on how it doesn’t comply, just that they don’t like it.

2. Apple’s multi-step user journey to download and install alternative app stores or apps on iPhones. The Commission will investigate whether the steps that a user has to undertake to successfully complete the download and installation of alternative app stores or apps, as well as the various information screens displayed by Apple to the user, comply with the DMA.

This sounds like they’re going to insist that Apple make installing sideloaded apps and alternative stores a no-hassle experience. What critics see is Apple putting up obstacles to installing marketplaces or sideloaded apps just to be a dick about it and discouraging their use to keep users in the App Store. What I see are reasonable warnings for potentially dangerous software. We’ll see how that goes.

Perhaps where the EC will wind up is making app store choice like web browser choice. Force Apple to present each user with a screen listing all available app marketplaces in their country in random order, of which Apple’s own App Store is but one, just like Safari in the default browser choice screen.

3. The eligibility requirements for developers related to the ability to offer alternative app stores or directly distribute apps from the web on iPhones. The Commission will investigate whether these requirements, such as the ‘membership of good standing’ in the Apple Developer Program, that app developers have to meet in order to be able to benefit from alternative distribution provided for in the DMA comply with the DMA.

I’m not sure what this is about, given that Apple relented on allowing even Epic Games to open a store. Maybe the financial requirements? Update: OK, this is probably about the other half of the eligibility requirements to offer a marketplace, too. One way to qualify as a marketplace is to provide Apple with a €1,000,000 letter of credit. The other is to “be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS and/or iPadOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” For sideloading, Apple requires that developers “Be a member in good standing of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS and/or iPadOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Apple’s requirements are an attempt to prevent fly-by-night scammers from opening marketplaces or offering nefarious apps for sideloading. But the EC sees that as a catch-22, where the only way to become a marketplace or offer sideloading is to already be a longstanding developer in Apple’s own App Store. So the EC is, I guess, saying don’t worry about fly-by-night scammers, Apple needs to allow any new developer to offer their apps outside the App Store or to provide their own marketplace.

In parallel, the Commission will continue undertaking preliminary investigative steps outside of the scope of the present investigation, in particular with respect to the checks and reviews put in place by Apple to validate apps and alternative app stores to be sideloaded.

This pretty clearly is about Apple using notarization as a review for anything other than egregious bugs or security vulnerabilities. I complain as much as anyone about the aspects of the DMA that are vague (or downright inscrutable), but this aspect seems clear-cut. It’s a bit baffling why Apple seemingly sees notarization as an opportunity for content/purpose review, like with last week’s brouhaha over the UTM SE PC emulator. Refusing to notarize an emulator that uses a JIT is something Apple ought to be able to defend under the DMA’s exceptions pertaining to device security; refusing to notarize an emulator that doesn’t use a JIT seems clearly forbidden by the DMA.

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Sunday, 23 June 2024

Kolide by 1Password ★

My thanks to Kolide by 1Password for sponsoring last week at DF. The September 2023 MGM hack is one of the most notorious ransomware attacks in recent years. Journalists and cybersecurity experts rushed to report on the broken slot machines, angry hotel guests, and the fateful phishing call to MGM’s help desk that started it all.

But while it’s true that MGM’s help desk needed better ways of verifying employee identity, there’s another factor that should have stopped the hackers in their tracks. That’s where you should focus your attention. In fact, if you just focus your vision, you’ll find you’re already staring at the security story the pros have been missing.

It’s the device you’re reading this on.

To read more about what they learned after researching the MGM hack — like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story — check out the Kolide by 1Password blog.

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Friday, 21 June 2024

Reggie Jackson on Willie Mays’s Legacy, and the Abject Racism Faced by Black Baseball Players in the 1960s ★

The whole 8-minute clip is excellent and worth your time, but do not miss the second half, starting with a sharp question from Alex Rodriguez at the 4:30 mark. Reggie describes, in heartfelt detail, the abject racism he faced as a minor league player as recently as the 1960s. Restaurants he couldn’t eat at. Hotels he couldn’t stay at. Threats to burn to the ground the apartment building where he was sleeping. The pain, over five decades later, remains searing.

Kudos to Fox Sports for airing this. We can’t celebrate progress without honestly facing society’s dark past. (Kudos too, for putting a box of Reggie Bars at the desk. Respect.)

EU Users Won’t Get Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, or the New SharePlay Screen Sharing Features This Year, Thanks to the DMA ★

The Financial Times:

Apple blamed complexities in making the system compatible with EU rules that have forced it to make key parts of its iOS software and App Store services interoperable with third parties.

“Due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act,” Apple said on Friday, “we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.”

Kudos to Apple for breaking this news to the Financial Times, of all outlets. Poetry in media relations. Here’s the full on-the-record statement, provided to me by an Apple spokesperson:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

None of these features are available yet in the developer beta OS releases, but it is my understanding that the first two — iPhone Mirroring and the new SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements (where you’ll be able to see and doodle on the screens of others, like, say, if you’re providing remote help or how-to instructions to a friend or family member) — will be in the next developer betas, coming early next week. Apple Intelligence won’t even enter beta until later this summer. But in the meantime, even in beta, none of these features will be available within the EU.

The Mac is not considered a “gatekeeping” platform in the EU, but the iPhone and iPad are, and the iPhone Mirroring and screen sharing features obviously involve those platforms. I think Apple could try to thread a needle here and release Apple Intelligence only on the Mac in the EU, but given how inscrutable the European Commission’s interpretation of the DMA is — where gatekeepers are expected to somehow suss out the “spirit of the law” regardless of what the letter of the law says — I don’t see how Apple can be blamed for pausing the rollout in the EU, no matter the platform.

The EU’s self-induced slide into a technological backwater continues.

Thursday, 20 June 2024

Matt Levine on OpenAI’s True Purpose ★

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

OpenAI was founded to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of outside commercial pressures. And now every once in a while it shoots out a new AI firm whose mission is to build artificial general intelligence safely, free of the commercial pressures at OpenAI.

Anthropic Introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet ★

Anthropic:

Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows.

In an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64% of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38%. Our evaluation tests the model’s ability to fix a bug or add functionality to an open source codebase, given a natural language description of the desired improvement. When instructed and provided with the relevant tools, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit, and execute code with sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities. It handles code translations with ease, making it particularly effective for updating legacy applications and migrating codebases.

I’ll take them with a grain of self-promoting salt, but the evaluation tests presented by Anthropic position Claude 3.5 Sonnet as equal to or better than ChatGPT-4o. Again: I don’t think there’s a moat in this game.

Also, from the bottom of the post, this interesting nugget:

One of the core constitutional principles that guides our AI model development is privacy. We do not train our generative models on user-submitted data unless a user gives us explicit permission to do so. To date we have not used any customer or user-submitted data to train our generative models.

Even Apple can’t say that. Follow-Up: “Training Large Language Models on the Public Web”.

Warp’s Agent Mode: Natural Language for Terminal Commands ★

Michelle Lim, writing for the Warp blog (Warp, I’ll note, has previously sponsored DF):

Agent Mode raises the level of abstraction in the terminal. Using natural language, you can ask the terminal to accomplish any high level task without worrying about the specific commands you need.

Agent Mode knows when it needs more information to help you complete a task. It will ask permission to run commands on your machine and use the outputs to guide you, step-by-step. It’s also self-correcting when it runs into errors.

Because Agent Mode executes tasks through the CLI, it integrates with practically any service with zero configuration. If the service has a CLI, an API, or publicly available docs, you can use Agent Mode for the task. Agent Mode has inherent knowledge of most public CLIs, and you can easily teach it how to use internal CLIs by asking it to read their help content.

Man (no pun intended?), is this cool. I just tried “How do I generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” and got:

You can generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following shell command in the Fish shell:

  printf "%04d\n" (random 0 9999)

And when I followed up with “How can I use jot to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999?” I got:

You can use the jot command to generate a random number between 0000 and 9999 using the following command:

  jot -w "%04d" -r 1 0 9999

Both of which answers are correct. For jot — a tool I first learned about, of course, from the inimitable Dr. Drang — I think a simpler, and thus better, answer is:

jot -r 1 0000 9999

but Warp’s Agent Mode suggestion is certainly good enough.

Lacking Votes, EU Postpones Vote on CSAM Law That Would Ban End-to-End-Encryption for Messaging ★

Clothilde Goujard, reporting for Politico:

A vote scheduled today to amend a draft law that may require WhatsApp and Signal to scan people’s pictures and links for potential child sexual abuse material was removed from European Union countries’ agenda, according to three EU diplomats.

Ambassadors in the EU Council were scheduled to decide whether to back a joint position on an EU regulation to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But many EU countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic were expected to abstain or oppose the law over cybersecurity and privacy concerns.

“In the last hours, it appeared that the required qualified majority would just not be met,” said an EU diplomat from the Belgian presidency, which is spearheading negotiations until end June as chair of the EU Council.

Sanity prevails — for now.

‘This $8 Cardboard Knife Will Change Your Life’ ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at The Obsessor:

The cardboard is inescapable if you use Amazon or other online stores, they pile up in the hallways and next to the garbage cans and you triage as you can.

We get so many that I have to break down our boxes in order to fit them in our recycle bin. I’ve used all of the typical tools — scissors, pocket knife, box cutter — and many unconventional ones like drywall saws just trying to make this painful job a bit easier.

The CANARY is uniquely serrated all the way around its edge, like a chainsaw. This makes it incredibly good at cutting cardboard either with or across corrugation with ease. I cannot express how easily this knife cuts cardboard, it’s like slicing through regular old paper, it’s amazing.

Last year when I linked to (and recommended) Studio Neat’s Keen — the world’s best box cutter, but which costs about $100 — at least one reader recommended the Canary. For $8 I figured why not. It truly is an amazing product. I do still love my prototype Keen but for opening and breaking down cardboard boxes, the Canary can’t be beat. It’s both highly effective and very safe.

‘Fast Crimes at Lambda School’ ★

Ben Sandofksy went deep on the history of Lambda School, a learn-to-code startup that aimed to disrupt computer science education, and its founder, Austen Allred:

What set his boot camp apart from the others were “Income Share Agreements.” Instead of paying up-front for tuition, students agreed to pay a portion of future income. If you don’t get a job, you pay nothing. It was an idea so clever it became a breakout hit of Y Combinator, the same tech incubator that birthed Stripe, AirBnb, and countless other unicorns.

When Lambda School launched in 2017, critics likened ISAs to indentured servitude, but by 2019 it was Silicon Valley’s golden child. Every day, Austen tweeted jaw-dropping results. [...]

Things got worse from there, and we’ll get to it. First I need to address a common question: what do I have to do with any of this? I have no professional or personal connections to the company or the team. What compelled me to follow this story for the last five years?

On the surface, this is another window into the 2010’s tech bubble, a period where mediocre people could raise ludicrous money amid a venture capitalist echo chamber fueled by low-interest rates. But what makes this any worse than Juicero, Clinkle, or Humane? Why does this rise to the level of Theranos?

These stories hinge on their villains, whose hubris and stupidity end in comeuppance. Theranos had Elizabeth Holmes, Fyre Festival had Bobby McFarlane, and Lambda School has Austen Allred.

Independent journalism at its best.

Apple ID to Be Renamed to Apple Account ★

Adam Engst, TidBITS:

The real problem comes when tech writers document features across multiple versions of Apple’s operating systems. We’ll probably use both terms for a while before slowly standardizing on the new term. Blame Apple if you see awkward sentences like “Continuity features require that you be logged into the same Apple Account (Apple ID in pre-2024 operating systems).” Or maybe writers will compress further to “Continuity features require that you be logged into the same Apple Account/ID.”

I do think “Apple Account” is a better name, so I think the transitional pain is worthwhile.

Wednesday, 19 June 2024

Perplexity AI Is Lying About Their User Agent ★

Robb Knight:

I put up a post about blocking AI bots after the block was in place, so assuming the user agents are sent, there’s no way Perplexity should be able to access my site. So I asked:

What is this post about https://fatv8.com/3sw653_9cmnoqltiher/4xjystn/4tqystbgovn-ytqh-roqk-vnovj/

I got a perfect summary of the post including various details that they couldn’t have just guessed. Read the full response here. So what the fuck are they doing?

I checked a few sites and this is just Google Chrome running on Windows 10. So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string. I can’t even block their IP ranges because it appears these headless browsers are not on their IP ranges.

Terrific, succinct write-up documenting that Perplexity has clearly been reading and indexing web pages that it is forbidden, by site owner policy, from reading and indexing — all contrary to Perplexity’s own documentation and public statements.

Wired: ‘Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine’ ★

Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, reporting for Wired (News+ link):

A Wired analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight suggest that Perplexity is able to achieve this partly through apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite claiming that it won’t. Wired observed a machine tied to Perplexity — more specifically, one on an Amazon server and almost certainly operated by Perplexity — doing this on wired.com and across other Condé Nast publications.

The Wired analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with appropriate credit, is also prone to bullshitting, in the technical sense of the word.

This paints Perplexity as, effectively, an IP theft engine, and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, as a degenerate liar. None of this is an oversight or just playing fast and loose. It’s a scheme to deliberately circumvent the plain intention of website owners not to have Perplexity index their sites. Liars and thieves. Utterly shameless.

A Rose by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet; An Encryption Back Door by Any Other Name Would Still Smell Like Shit ★

Signal president Meredith Whittaker, responding to a new initiative in the EU to ban end-to-end-encryption (for some reason published as a PDF despite the fact that Signal has a blog):

In November, the EU Parliament lit a beacon for global tech policy when it voted to exclude end-to-end encryption from mass surveillance orders in the chat control legislation. This move responded to longstanding expert consensus, and a global coalition of hundreds of preeminent computer security experts who patiently weighed in to explain the serious dangers of the approaches on the table — approaches that aimed to subject everyone’s private communications to mass scanning against a government-curated database or AI model of “acceptable” speech and content.

There is no way to implement such proposals in the context of end-to-end encrypted communications without fundamentally undermining encryption and creating a dangerous vulnerability in core infrastructure that would have global implications well beyond Europe.

Instead of accepting this fundamental mathematical reality, some European countries continue to play rhetorical games. They’ve come back to the table with the same idea under a new label. Instead of using the previous term “client-side scanning,” they’ve rebranded and are now calling it “upload moderation.” Some are claiming that “upload moderation” does not undermine encryption because it happens before your message or video is encrypted. This is untrue.

Yes, but it’s a great idea to let these same EU bureaucrats design how mobile software distribution should work.

Copilot Plus PCs, Where the ‘Plus’ Means More Dumb Stickers ★

Paul Thurrott on Threads, after getting his new Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge laptop:

Former Windows head Terry Myerson once told me the goal of partnering with Qualcomm on Windows on Arm was to “get those f#$%ing Intel stickers off of PCs.”

Mission accomplished, Terry. There are no Intel stickers on the new Qualcomm-based Copilot+ PCs.

Still covered with stickers. And as Thurrott’s photo hints at, and this screenshot from Tim Schofield’s unboxing video shows clearly, Samsung can’t even be bothered to apply the stickers straight. Looks like they were applied by a little kid. Screams “premium” experience.

Two of these stickers don’t even make sense. The Snapdragon one is obviously paid for by Qualcomm, the same way Intel pays PC makers to apply their stickers. But why would Samsung booger up its own laptops with stickers promoting their own Dynamic AMOLED 2X display technology? And what’s the deal with the Energy Star stickers? Who pays to put those on laptops and why?

Samsung Warns That Their New Snapdragon-Based PCs Aren’t Compatible With Fortnite or Some Adobe Apps ★

Yang Jie and Jiyoung Sohn, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link):

Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 Edge [sic], which went on sale Tuesday in the U.S., South Korea and some other markets, contains Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor. It runs a version of Microsoft’s Windows 11 for PCs that uses technology from U.K.-based Arm.

On Wednesday, Samsung put a notice on its Korean-language product site listing applications that it currently determines are incompatible with the new laptop or can’t be installed. The list included some Adobe software as well as popular games including “League of Legends” and “Fortnite.”

Sounds like maybe Microsoft’s Prism isn’t as good as Apple’s Rosetta 2 after all? Or that Prism isn’t capable of running low-level anti-piracy (Adobe) and anti-cheating (Epic) rootkit-style system extensions?

The issues offer an early hint of the challenges some tech companies may face as they introduce new AI-powered computers and smartphones while seeking to maintain compatibility with existing software.

What an odd paragraph. This has nothing to do with phones, and the only “tech companies” affected are Microsoft, who makes Windows, and PC makers whose machines run Windows and have adopted Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon chips. Macs made the transition from Intel’s x86 architecture to Apple’s ARM-based Apple silicon without users noticing anything other than dramatically longer battery life and faster performance, including when running x86 software in emulation.

(I put a sic above because Samsung’s new laptops are named “Galaxy Book4 Edge”, with no space between the “Book” and the “4”. Great product name that rolls right off the tongue, as usual, from Samsung.)

FTC Lawsuit Alleges Adobe’s Cancellation Fees Are Illegal ★

Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:

The government’s heavily redacted complaint laid out Adobe’s alleged scheme, which starts with “manipulative enrollment practices.”

To lock subscribers into recurring monthly payments, Adobe would typically pre-select by default its most popular “annual paid monthly” plan, the FTC alleged. That subscription option locked users into an annual plan despite paying month to month. If they canceled after a two-week period, they’d owe Adobe an early termination fee (ETF) that costs 50 percent of their remaining annual subscription. The “material terms” of this fee are hidden during enrollment, the FTC claimed, only appearing in “disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see.” [...]

Because Adobe allegedly only alerted users to the ETF in fine print — by hovering over a small icon or clicking a hyperlink in small text — while the company’s cancellation flows made it hard to end recurring payments, the FTC is suing and accusing Adobe of deceptive practices under the FTC Act.

Adobe is too good a company to push dark-pattern subscription schemes like this. They should concede, apologize, and eliminate every subscription that isn’t a simple straightforward annual or monthly plan.

Mike Masnick: ‘The Surgeon General Is Wrong; Social Media Doesn’t Need Warning Labels’ ★

Mike Masnick, writing for The Daily Beast:

We put health warnings on things that are inherently harmful, with little redeeming health value. That is, things that are actually toxins: nicotine, lead, poisons.

The complaints here are with speech. [...]

The American Psychological Association released a similar report, concluding: “Using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Instead, it finds that when young people struggle with mental health, their online lives are often just a reflection of their offline lives.

Lots of other research has shown the same thing, yet Murthy’s call for health warnings never mentions all of this research that suggests social media is actually beneficial for many. Instead, he cites a few anecdotes of children who were bullied online. But bullying happened prior to social media, and we did not talk about putting health warnings on telephones or notepads or other forms of communication.

Just pure panic-driven ninny-ism. It’s like the whole nonsense with “trigger warnings”. Masnick brings up Reagan-era Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s nonsensical crusade against video games in the 1980s. I’m also reminded of Tipper Gore’s campaign for warning labels on music albums.

OpenAI Expats Found ‘Safe Superintelligence Inc.’ ★

Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy:

We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.

This way, we can scale in peace.

Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures.

We are an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, where we have deep roots and the ability to recruit top technical talent.

Sutskever was the chief scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, who launched a failed coup against Sam Altman earlier this year. I certainly hope they’re more safe than OpenAI is open.

(Via Techmeme.)

‘That’s Odd — Usually the Blood Gets Off at the Second Floor’ ★

Speaking of Louie Mantia, back in 2011 he made a terrific wallpaper of the iconic hallway carpeting from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. He just remade it, with even better color accuracy and texture. And to go along with it, a new wallpaper based on the carpet inside room 237. There ain’t nothing in room 237. But you ain’t got no business going in there anyway. So stay out. You understand? Stay out. But feel free to use the wallpaper.

Louie Mantia on Dark Mode App Icons ★

Louie Mantia:

Apple’s announcement of “dark mode” icons has me thinking about how I would approach adapting “light mode” icons for dark mode. I grabbed 12 icons we made at Parakeet for our clients to illustrate some ways of going about it. [...]

Unfortunately, some icons appear to have lost or gained weight in dark mode. For example, the Settings gear didn’t change size in dark mode, but it appears to occupy less space because the dark circle around it blends with its background. That makes it appear smaller than the Find My icon, which now looks enormous next to FaceTime. This is a remnant of some questionable design choices in iOS 7 that have lingered now for the last decade.

That last sentence is the most diplomatic thing I’ve ever heard from Louie. What a splendid post this is — exemplary work to illustrate his advice.

Tuesday, 18 June 2024

Jon Stewart Talks About His Split With Apple on Matthew Belloni’s ‘The Town’ ★

Interesting two-part interview, with far more information than we’ve heard about the demise of The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+. Part two is here; Overcast links to parts one and two; Apple Podcasts links to parts one and two.

Some nuggets:

• The split seemed very much amicable. Stewart isn’t one to hold back, and he emphasized repeatedly there are no hard feelings. He even professed to getting his morning news in Apple News.

• Apple paid the show’s staff for all of season 3, despite cancelling the show before production began. That’s nearly unheard of in the entertainment industry.

• Stewart himself admits that season one more or less stunk.

Well worth a listen.

Willie Mays, Greatest Centerfielder in Baseball History, Dies at 93 ★

John Shea, the San Francisco Chronicle:

Willie Mays, the iconic and endearing “Say Hey Kid” who charmed countless fans with his brilliant athleticism and graceful style and was widely considered baseball’s greatest and most entertaining player, died Tuesday of heart failure. He was 93.

“My father has passed away peacefully and among loved ones,” Mays son, Michael Mays, said. “I want to thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart for the unwavering love you have shown him over the years. You have been his life’s blood.” [...]

Mays spent most of his 23-year playing career with the Giants, six in New York and 15 in San Francisco, making him a cherished superstar from coast to coast. He hit 660 home runs, made 24 All-Star appearances and won 12 Gold Gloves, which weren’t given out until Mays’ sixth season.

The consummate five-tool player, Mays was elite at hitting, power hitting, defending, throwing and baserunning, and his ability to out-think and out-smart the competition served as a valuable sixth tool.

My dad was a clerk in the Navy, stationed in New York for a stint in the late 1950s, and they’d give free tickets to servicemen to attend ballgames for all three teams in the city: the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants. At the time, all three clubs had centerfielders destined for the Hall of Fame: Mickey Mantle, Duke Snider, and Mays. My dad has never wavered from his conviction that Willie Mays was the best baseball player he ever saw, hands down. He hit for power and average, ran like the wind, made catches no one else could make, and had a cannon for an arm.

Best ballplayer I’ve seen play was Mays’s godson, Barry Bonds.

Why Dolphin Isn’t Coming to the App Store (Spoiler: It Needs a JIT) ★

“OatmealDome”, developer of an iOS fork of the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin:

Two weeks ago, Apple modified their App Store guidelines to allow retro game emulators in the App Store. This week, Delta, a multi-system emulator that was previously only available via AltStore, was released on the App Store. Since these events happened, we’ve been asked many times if we will submit DolphiniOS (our fork of Dolphin) to the App Store.

Unfortunately, no.

Apple still does not allow us to use a vital technology that is necessary for Dolphin to run with good performance: JIT. [...]

Unfortunately, Apple generally does not allow apps to use JIT recompilers on iOS. The only exceptions are Safari and alternative web browsers in Europe. We submitted a DMA interoperability request to Apple for JIT support, but Apple denied the request a few weeks ago.

Swift Playgrounds is an exception too. Apple trusts itself to use JIT compilation safely, but not third-party developers. That’s not unreasonable — but I’m not sure it’s compliant with the DMA.

Open Source PC Emulator UTM Blocked by Apple for Notarization, Including Through EU Marketplaces ★

Michael Tsai:

This is confusing, but I think what Apple is saying is that, even with notarization, apps are not allowed to “download executable code.” Rule 2.5.2 says apps may not “download, install, or execute code” except for limited educational purposes. Rule 4.7 makes an exception to this so that retro game emulators and some other app types can run code “that is not embedded in the binary.” This is grayed out when you select “Show Notarization Review Guidelines Only”, meaning that the exception only applies within the App Store. Thus, the general prohibition remains in effect for App Marketplaces and Web Distribution. But it seems like this wasn’t initially clear to Apple, either, because the review process took two months.

This also seems inconsistent with the fact that the Delta emulator is allowed to be notarized outside the App Store. It doesn’t make much sense for the rules to be more lax within the App Store. I first thought the mistake was that Apple didn’t mean to gray out 4.7 for notarization. Then everything would make sense. But the clarification states that 4.7 is not intended to apply to notarization.

The bottom line for me is that Apple doesn’t want general-purpose emulators, it’s questionable whether the DMA lets it block them, and even siding with Apple on this it isn’t consistently applying its own rules.

Confusing indeed. Apple’s stance on this seems inscrutable and arbitrary: retro game emulators are, at long last, acceptable, but general PC emulators are not. Such arbitrary policy decisions related to the purpose of the app are fine for the App Store (legally speaking), but clearly not compliant with the DMA. That’s one of the few areas where the DMA is clear. Apple can, of course, ban (say) porno apps from the App Store, but can’t refuse to notarize them for distribution outside the App Store in the EU.

Apple has a security leg to stand on when it comes to JIT compilation, but the version of UTM (UTM SE) that was held up in review for two months, and ultimately rejected by Apple, doesn’t use a JIT. And because it doesn’t use a JIT, performance is poor; hence the UTM developers’ deeming it not worth fighting about. Apple goes into depth on the security challenges pertaining to JIT compilation in its documentation for BrowserEngineKit, the framework for developing non-WebKit browser engines for distribution in the EU. That’s ostensibly the reason why developers need a special entitlement to use a custom browser engine — JavaScript engines need a JIT to perform well but JITs pose a security risk.

In an earlier revision of this post, I suggested that Delta — Riley Testut’s excellent and wildly popular retro Nintendo console emulator for iOS — uses a JIT. There is indeed a JIT in Delta’s source code repository, but Testut informs me that it’s currently only enabled through the version of AltStore distributed through sideloading. Delta’s JIT is removed from the versions of Delta in the App Store and AltStore PAL (the EU app marketplace), because of Apple’s restrictions on JIT compilers. No app with a JIT is going to pass review by Apple, including for distribution outside the App Store in the EU. That restriction should, in theory, be permitted under the DMA on security grounds. But how the no-JIT version of UTM could be rejected for notarization, I do not see.

(Thinking about BrowserEngineKit makes me wonder: Now that over four months have passed since Apple announced its initial DMA compliance plans, has even a single browser developer announced plans to bring their own rendering engine to iOS in the EU? As far as I know the answer is no. It’s entirely possible Apple went to all the trouble of creating BrowserEngineKit for compliance with the DMA, but no one is actually going to use it because no browser developer deems the EU market worth forking their browser for, solely for distribution outside the App Store — while on the hook for the 50-euro-cents-per-download Core Technology Fee if such a browser becomes popular.)

Popular AI Chatbots — Including ChatGPT, Mistral, and Meta AI — Spread Russian Propaganda (Because of Course They Do) ★

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

To conduct the study, NewsGuard entered prompts asking about narratives known to have been created by John Mark Dougan, an American fugitive who, per the New York Times, is creating and spreading misinformation from Moscow.

• Entering 57 prompts into 10 leading chatbots, NewsGuard found they spread Russian disinformation narratives 32% of the time, often citing Dougan’s fake local news sites as a reliable source.
• The chatbots presented as fact false reports, originating on those sites, about a supposed wiretap discovered at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and a nonexistent Ukrainian troll factory interfering with U.S. elections.
• NewsGuard conducted its research on OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, You.com’s Smart Assistant, Grok, Inflection, Mistral, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity.

Certainly worth researching, but I’d have been more surprised if these chatbots did not present Russian misinformation as fact. For chrissake they pass Onion articles, which are intended as parody, as fact. Russian misinformation is written with the intent of convincing the gullible that it’s legit; and LLMs are by nature gullible.

Scroll Reverser for MacOS ★

I use both a mouse and trackpad at my desk, but, for whatever reason, prefer “natural scrolling” with the trackpad, but reverse scrolling with the wheel on my mouse. Apple’s control panels for Mouse and Trackpad don’t allow you to specify different scrolling directions per input device.

But that’s exactly what Scroll Reverser does. It’s a super-simple utility by Nick Moore that does one thing and does it really well. I’ve been recommending it for over 10 years. Free of charge and open source.

Apple Security Research: ‘Private Cloud Compute: A New Frontier for AI Privacy in the Cloud’ ★

Apple:

We designed Private Cloud Compute to ensure that privileged access doesn’t allow anyone to bypass our stateless computation guarantees.

First, we intentionally did not include remote shell or interactive debugging mechanisms on the PCC node. Our Code Signing machinery prevents such mechanisms from loading additional code, but this sort of open-ended access would provide a broad attack surface to subvert the system’s security or privacy. Beyond simply not including a shell, remote or otherwise, PCC nodes cannot enable Developer Mode and do not include the tools needed by debugging workflows.

Next, we built the system’s observability and management tooling with privacy safeguards that are designed to prevent user data from being exposed. For example, the system doesn’t even include a general-purpose logging mechanism. Instead, only pre-specified, structured, and audited logs and metrics can leave the node, and multiple independent layers of review help prevent user data from accidentally being exposed through these mechanisms. With traditional cloud AI services, such mechanisms might allow someone with privileged access to observe or collect user data.

Many details here, but many still to come.

Monday, 17 June 2024

Ming-Chi Kuo Says This Year’s Series 10 Apple Watches Will Increase in Size ★

Ming-Chi Kuo:

The Series 10 will feature form factor upgrades, including larger screen sizes (increasing from 45mm/41mm to about 49mm/45mm) and a thinner design.

Unlike other devices Apple sells, Apple Watch sizes are given not by screen diagonal but by case height. So what Kuo is claiming is that the current “big” size will become the small size and the new big size will be much bigger. I find this very hard to believe. Since its inception Apple Watch has stood out among smartwatches for making models that are appropriate for people with small wrists.

Anecdotally, almost all women I see wearing an Apple Watch are wearing a small one, and I see a fair number of men who’ve chosen the smaller size as well. As I wrote when reviewing the first Apple Watch Ultra, many people are self conscious about wearing a watch that’s “too big” for their wrist. That concern is often misguided — most people look just fine wearing a bigger watch — but it doesn’t change the fact that people are very reluctant to buy a watch that they fear looks too big on them.

Worth noting that three years ago Kuo, along with Mark Gurman, was completely wrong about the design of the Series 7 watches, with both of them claiming it would have flat sides like the iPhone 12. But it’s also worth noting that back in August, Gurman reported that year’s watches would introduce a new band system that breaks compatibility with existing bands, which, notably, have remained unchanged since Series 0 in 2015. (In fact I’m wearing my space black link bracelet from my own Series 0 on my Series 7 today.)

Apple Discontinuing Apple Pay Later, Just 8 Months After Rolling Out in the U.S. ★

Apple, in a statement to 9to5Mac:

Starting later this year, users across the globe will be able to access installment loans offered through credit and debit cards, as well as lenders, when checking out with Apple Pay. With the introduction of this new global installment loan offering, we will no longer offer Apple Pay Later in the U.S. Our focus continues to be on providing our users with access to easy, secure and private payment options with Apple Pay, and this solution will enable us to bring flexible payments to more users, in more places across the globe, in collaboration with Apple Pay enabled banks and lenders.

This always seemed like a weird offering from Apple. Apple Pay Later did not charge interest, which is great, but it still seemed contrary to the spirit of helping people develop good financial habits. A no-interest loan doesn’t change the fact that in general, you should only buy things you can afford to pay for in full now.

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