Apple Archive

We’ve been talking a lot about sleazy ways in which the online advertising industry is conspiring with browser makers – who also happen to be in the online advertising industry – to weaken privacy features so they can still track you and the ads they serve you, but with “privacy”. They’re trying really hard to make it seem as if they’re doing us a huge favour by making tracking slightly more private, and browser makers are falling over themselves to convince us that allowing some user and ad tracking is the only way to stop the kind of total everything, everywhere, all at once tracking we have now. We’ve got Google and Chrome pushing something called “Privacy Sandbox“, and we’ve got Mozilla and Facebook pushing something called “Privacy-Preserving Attribution“, both of which are designed to give the advertising industry slightly more private tracking in the desperate hope they won’t still be doing a lot more tracking on the side. Safari users, meanwhile, have been feeling pretty good about all of this in the knowledge Apple cares about privacy, so surely Safari won’t be doing any of this. You know where this is going, right? Today, the WebKit project published a lengthy blog post detailing all the various additional measures it’s taking to make its Private Browsing mode more, well, private, and a lot of them are great moves, very welcome, and ensure that private browsing on Safari is a little bit more private than it is on Chrome, as the blog post gleefully points out. However, not long into the blog post, the shoe drops. We also expanded Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) as a replacement for tracking parameters in URL to help developers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns even under Private Browsing. ↫ John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman A little further down, they go into more detail: Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) is a way for advertisers, websites, and apps to implement ad attribution and click measurement in a privacy-preserving way. You can read more about it here. Alongside the new suite of enhanced privacy protections in Private Browsing, Safari also brings a version of Web AdAttributionKit to Private Browsing. This allows click measurement and attribution to continue working in a privacy-preserving manner. ↫ John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman So not only does Safari already include the kind of tracking technology everyone is – rightfully – attacking Mozilla over for adding it to Firefox, Apple and the Safari team are actually taking it a step further and making this ad tracking technology available in private browsing mode. The technology is limited a bit more in Private Browsing mode, but its intent is preserved: to track you and the ads you see online. I would hazard a guess that when you enable a browser’s private browsing or incognito mode, you assume that means zero tracking. We already know that Chrome’s Incognito mode leaks data like a sieve with bullet holes in it, and now it seems Safari’s Private Browsing mode, too, is going to allow advertisers to track you and the ads you see – blog post full of fancy privacy features be damned. Do you know those “Around the web” chumboxes? Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’ve most definitely seen these things all over the web, and really hate them. A major player in the chumbox business is a company called Taboola, a name that’s quite despised and reviled online. Popular Apple blogger John Gruber called Taboola a “slumlord” and the “lowest common denominator clickbait property“. Do you want to know which major technology company just signed a massive deal with Taboola? Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. ↫ Sara Fischer at Axios Apple needs to find new markets to keep growing, and clearly, pestering its users with upsells and subscriptions to its services isn’t enough. The online advertising industry is massive – just look at Google’s and Facebook’s financial disclosures – and Apple seems to be interested in taking a bigger slice of that fat pie. And as Google and now Mozilla are finding out, a browser that blocks ads and ad tracking kind of gets in the way of that. Anyone who can make and sell plug-and-play Pi-Hole devices even normal people can use is going to make a killing.

A few weeks ago, I broke the news that Mozilla had removed several anti-censorship Firefox extensions from its store in Russia, and a few days later I also broke the news they reversed course on their decision and reinstated the extensions. Perhaps not worthy of a beauty prize, as a Dutch saying goes, but at least the turnaround time was short, and they did the right thing in the end. Well, let’s see how Apple is going to deal with the exact same situation. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that bowing under pressure from the same Russian censors that targeted Mozilla, the company has removed a whole slew of VPN applications used by Russians to evade the stringent totalitarian censorship laws in the warmongering nation. Apple has removed several apps offering virtual private network (VPN) services from the Russian AppStore, following a request from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday. The VPN services removed by Apple include leading services such as ProtonVPN, Red Shield VPN, NordVPN and Le VPN. Those living in Russia will no longer be able to download the services, while users who already have them on their phones can continue using them, but will be unable to update them. ↫ Novaya Gazeta Europe Apple has a long history of falling in line with the demands from dictators and totalitarian regimes, and Russia is no stranger to telling Apple what to do. Earlier this year, Apple was ordered to remove an application developed by the team of the murdered opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and of course, Apple rolled over and complied. Much like Apple’s grotesque suck-up behaviour in China, This stands in stark contrast to Apple’s whining, complaining, and tantrums in the European Union. It seems Apple finds it more comfortable to operating under dictators than in democracies.

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. In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, including Apple’s new “Core Technology Fee”, fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple’s obligations under the DMA. ↫ European Commission press release File this in the category for entirely expected news that is the opposite of surprising. Apple has barely even been maliciously compliant with the DMA, and the European Commission is entirely right in pursuing the company for its continued violation of the law. The DMA really isn’t a very complicated law, and the fact the world’s most powerful and wealthiest corporation in the world can’t seem to adapt its products to the privacy and competition laws here in the EU is clearly just a bunch of grandstanding and whining. In fact, I find that the European Commission is remarkably lenient and cooperative in its dealings with the major technology giants in general, and Apple in particular. They’ve been in talks with Apple for a long time now in preparation for the DMA, the highest-ranking EU officials regularly talked with Apple and Tim Cook, they’ve been given ample warnings, instructions, and additional time to make sure their products do not violate the law – as a European Union citizen, I can tell you no small to medium business or individual EU citizen gets this kind of leniency and silk gloves treatment. Everything Apple is reaping, it sowed all by itself. As I posted on Mastodon a few days ago: The EU enacted a new law a while ago that all bottle caps should remain attached to the bottle, to combat plastic trash. All the bottle and packaging makers, from massive multinationals like Coca Cola and fucking Nestlé to small local producers invested in the development of new caps, changing their production lines, and shipping the new caps. Today, a month before the law goes into effect, it’s basically impossible to find a bottle without an attached cap. I don’t know, I thought this story was weirdly relevant right now with Apple being a whiny bitch. Imagine being worse than Coca Cola and motherfucking Nestlé. ↫ Thom Holwerda Apple is in this mess and facing insane fines as high as 10% of their worldwide turnover because spoiled, rich, privileged brats like Tim Cook are not used to anyone ever saying “no”. Silicon Valley has shown, time and time again, from massive data collection for advertising purposes to scraping the entire web for machine learning, that they simply do not understand consent. Now that there’s finally someone big, strong, and powerful enough to not take Silicon Valley’s bullshit, they start throwing tamper tantrums like toddlers. Apple’s public attacks on the European Union – and their instructions to their PR attack dogs to step it up a notch – are not doing them any favours, either. The EU is, contrary to just about any other government body in the Western world, ridiculously popular among its citizens, and laws that curb the power of megacorps are even more popular. I honestly have no idea who’s running their PR department, because they’re doing a terrible job, at least here in the EU.

I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the “Erase” option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the “Erase” option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the “Erase” option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I’m excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18! ↫ Kaleb Cadle It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it’s not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it’s better than nothing. This won’t magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around. Baby steps, I guess.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems. If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve. In short, these server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for offloaded machine learning requests. The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing. ↫ Apple’s security research blog Apple also provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright, available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these statements alone. From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new machine learning features.

iOS 17.5 seems to be experiencing a rather nasty bug that raises some very, very concerning questions about what Apple thinks “delete” really means. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. “Same here,” said one Redditor. “I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly.” “Same thing happened to me,” replied another user. “Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023.” More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: “I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today.” ↫ Tim Hardwick at MacRumors A report a few days later says that even on devices that have been wiped and sold, photos seem to be reappearing. This is even scarier than photos reappearing on devices you’re still using today – just think of all the iOS devices you’ve had and sold that might still be in use today. Users all over could be looking at old photos you took that you thought weren’t only deleted, but also wiped when you sold the devices in question. Apple has not said anything yet, but it further illustrates just how untrustworthy companies like Apple really are. Even taking into account it might take some time (minutes? An hour?) for a delete request to propagate through iCloud’s server network, there’s obviously no way photos that were supposedly deleted years ago are resurfacing now – especially when entire device wipes are involved, and any new user isn’t even logged into the same iCloud account. I hope for everyone involved – the users, that is, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Apple – that this isn’t very widespread, because the last thing any of us needs is old nude photos reappearing on random people’s devices. What a mess.

Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices. The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica You know where to get them.

Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a “Finder”-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560×192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. ↫ Apple II DeskTop GitHub page The goal of this project is to reverse-engineer Apple II DeskTop, and fix bugs and enhance it in the process. I didn’t actually know that the Apple IIgs initially shipped with this instead of the 16 bit GS/OS, which is the operating system I personally associate with the IIgs. Apple II DeskTop was largely 8 bit, and built on top of ProDOS 16, and didn’t really take full advantage of the IIgs hardware. It wasn’t until version 4.0 of the system software that the IIgs switched over to GS/OS. The latest release is v1.4-alpha9, released a few days ago. Apple II DeskTop is still entirely compatible with Apple II machines and clones from before the IIgs, as well, and it runs in emulators, too. We actually already covered this project a few years ago, but a reminder that this exists never hurt anyone.

If you’ve read my first post about Spatial Video, the second about Encoding Spatial Video, or if you’ve used my command-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple’s mysterious “fisheye” projection format. Mysterious because they’ve documented a CMProjectionType.fisheye enumeration with no elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this format, yet they’ve provided no method to produce or playback third-party content using this projection type. Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven’t responded to an open question on the Apple Discussion Forums asking for more detail, and they didn’t cover it in their WWDC23 sessions. As someone who has experience in this area – and a relentless curiosity – I’ve spent time digging-in to Apple’s fisheye projection format, and this post shares what I’ve learned. ↫ Mike Swanson There is just so much cool technology crammed into the Vision Pro, from the crazy displays down to, apparently, the encoding format for spatial video. Too bad Apple seems to have forgotten that a technology is not a product, as even the most ardent Apple supporterts – like John Gruber, or the hosts of ATP – have stated their Vision Pro devices are lying unused, collecting dust, just months after launch.

Before the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, Apple forbade the inclusion of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as a guest and steered the show away from confronting issues related to artificial intelligence, according to Jon Stewart. ↫ Samuel Axon at Ars Technica Just when you thought Apple and Tim Cook couldn’t get any more unlikable.

Unboxing a new gadget is always a fun experience, but it’s usually marred somewhat by the setup process. Either your device has been in a box for months, or it’s just now launching and ships in the box with pre-release software. Either way, the first thing you have to do is connect to Wi-Fi and wait several minutes for an OS update to download and install. The issue is so common that going through a lengthy download is an expected part of buying anything that connects to the Internet. But what if you could update the device while it’s still in the box? That’s the latest plan cooked up by Apple, which is close to rolling out a system that will let Apple Stores wirelessly update new iPhones while they’re still in their boxes. The new system is called “Presto.” ↫ Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica That’s a lot of engineering for a small inconvenience. Just the way I like my engineering.

While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons. ↫ Joe Rossignol at MacRumors It’s 2024 and iOS’ Springboard is slowly catching up to the Palm OS launcher. I’m drowning in the innovation here.

The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple’s sins are made manifest. ↫ Cory Doctorow An absolutely brilliant response to the DoJ lawsuit from Cory Doctorow. You notice this “Apple exceptionalism” a lot right now because of the new laws in the EU and now the lawsuit by the US DoJ. Apple products being better is posited as a fact, a law of the universe, and as such, any claims, either through lawsuits or legislation, that Apple is doing something wrong, illegal, or anticompetitive are by definition false. Things that, according to them, make Apple products “superior” can simply not be illegal. You also notice this a lot when it comes to the existence of Android. People who don’t like being locked in or have issues with Apple’s behaviour can just switch to Android, right? The thought that there are real, monetary costs to switching from iOS to Android – costs driven up by Apple’s very behaviour – is irrelevant to them, because in the eyes of the tech pundit, everyone’s rich. What we’ll be discovering over the course of the DoJ lawsuit – a course that will take us years – is that the general public cares a lot less about Apple as a company than Apple tech pundits think it does. People have iPhones not because they love Apple, but because their previous phone was an iPhone, because of network effects, or a bit of both. I doubt the average (in this case) American gives a rat’s ass about Apple, and are much more worried about the fact they have to live paycheck-to-paycheck in a dysfunctional shell of a democracy while being told the economy is doing just great.

A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it’s not merely notable for what it is than what it has on it: a beta version of System 6.0.6 (the doomed release that Apple pulled due to bugs), Apple sales databases, two online services — the maligned Mac Prodigy client, along with classic AppleLink as used by Apple staff — and two presentations, one on Apple’s current Macintosh line and one on the upcoming System 7. Now that I’ve got the infamous Conner hard drive it came with safely copied over, it’s time to explore its contents some more. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research I wonder just how rare it is to find old internal presentations from a company like Apple. It seems like something that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s great to see this archived and documented.