People Really Hate AI

Even Apple fanboi are desperate to get AI off of their iPhone.

Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue.

A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Apple Intelligence out of macOS, disabling most of its AI features and removing downloaded models following the launch of macOS 27 last month.

Siri AI? Gone. ChatGPT and other AI extensions? Eliminated. Genmoji, random boxes offering to jazz up your writing, summaries of notifications and app content, and automatic photo clean-up? Never to be seen again.

More importantly, RemoveMacAI can claw back the storage occupied by Apple’s AI models - potentially over 12 GB, depending on the Mac. You might just get confused and think it’s 2025 again.

The impetus for RemoveMacAI, its creator Om Lahorey said in a LinkedIn post, is the fact that Apple made it practically impossible to remove Apple Intelligence features in macOS 27.

“The settings are spread across about a dozen places, some of them only under Screen Time,” Lahorey wrote over the weekend. “Even with every one turned off, the models stay on disk. I wanted it gone in one step, so I wrote RemoveMacAI.”

Unsurprisingly, Lahorey’s tool blew up on Hacker News, with plenty of people happy for an easy way to get rid of Apple AI tools. As of writing, the repo has over 1,500 stars, so it's clearly struck a nerve with frustrated macOS users.

They hate it, they really hate it!

First Peoples Get It

The Cherokee Nation has banned large data centers from tribal-owned lands.

The Cherokee Nation is joining the growing backlash against massive data center projects fueled by the AI boom.

Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. announced earlier this month that the Nation is banning hyperscale data center projects on land owned by or held in trust for the Cherokee Nation.

The decision follows a report from the Nation’s Data Center Task Force examining the economic, environmental, cultural, and community impacts of these developments across the Cherokee Nation Reservation. The report described hyperscale data centers as facilities that often span more than 10,000 square feet and require more than 100 megawatts of power.

As part of its report, the task force surveyed 1,593 Cherokee Nation citizens. About 64% said they opposed the construction of hyperscale data centers within the reservation.

Welcome to good governance. 

Meanwhile, in the Empire State

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has issued an order pausing data center projects.

I do not think that this will be permanent, Hochul is a corporate Dem, and she wants those campaign donations, but she is a pretty reliable political weather vane, which makes this a sort of, "Flaming Datum" of the current political climate.

Everyone hates data centers with a passion.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday paused incomplete state environmental permit applications for large datacenters while officials work out new rules, a process expected to take up to a year.

The order makes New York the first state to enact such a moratorium amid growing concerns over AI datacenters' impact on utility rates and public health.

“New York has always been at the forefront of innovation and change but we’ve also always guaranteed that New Yorkers benefit. As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it’s my responsibility to take action and lead,” Hochul said in a canned statement.

The order specifically targets large hyperscale datacenters capable of consuming at least 50 MW, subject to exemptions for manufacturing, research, education, and medical facilities. Prior to the AI boom, 50 megawatts would have been considered a large cloud campus.

Funny, Innit?

Yes, an anecdote is not data, but this story about how learning in a high school improved after it returned to pencil and paper sounds like it might mean something.

Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.

Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.

And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.

In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent.

“We’re having a lot of trouble in education and I think what my kids told us was that there is a solution and the solution is to go low-tech. Go back to the old ways of doing things,” Mulvaney told local TV news station KARE 11. “Remove all the distractions and we can get our kids back.”

To be fair, if I had to write everything long hand, it would probably kill me. (I do use pen and paper for note taking though)

I have been using a keyboard, starting with a powder blue Smith Corona typewriter, when I was 15, but it does seem to me that many of the computer aids in current education seem to be a cure worse than the disease.

Best Ad Blocker Software Ever

Someone has forked the popular antivirus software uBlock Origin and made tweaks to replace ads with "Glasses On" images from the John Carpenter movie They Live.

This is brilliant. 

A fork of uBlock Origin Lite doesn't just remove the ads from web pages; it replaces them with tiles containing slogans from John Carpenter's 1988 film They Live.

Published by Australian Dave Lawrence, the Chromium add-in (so it'll work in browsers such as Chrome and Edge) takes the uBlock Origin Lite content blocker (also known as uBO Lite) and tweaks it so that rather than simply hiding the ads, the ads are replaced with white boxes containing slogans from the movies. 

Lawrence listed them: "OBEY, CONSUME, WATCH TV, SLEEP, SUBMIT, CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, BUY, WORK, NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT, DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY." 

………

They Live is a science-fiction horror film in which the protagonist dons a pair of glasses that allow him to see the world as it truly is: run by ghoulish aliens using subliminal messaging to keep the population under control.

I would note that that They Live is a great movie, and great social commentary.  Watch it.

Meanwhile, I need to chew some bubblegum or kick ass. 

There's an App for That

There is an app on the Android Play Store that detects whether or not there is a Meta glasshole in your immediate vicinity potentially recording you.

I approve.

Worried that someone wearing Meta's snooping spyware goggles could be creeping up on you? Android users now have access to an app that can warn them if someone is wearing such smart glasses in their vicinity by using Bluetooth.

Last week, Yves Jeanrenaud, a deputy professor at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany, published Nearby Glasses, an Android app that scans Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising data for manufacturer identifiers associated with certain smart glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses.

"This app notifies you when smart glasses are nearby," Jeanrenaud explained in the project's GitHub repo. "It uses company [identifiers] in the Bluetooth data sent out by these [devices]."

In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, he elaborated on how the software works.

"Bluetooth devices broadcast small advertising packets," he wrote. "Even though MAC addresses (identifying a particular device) and service UUIDs (identifying what they are doing) are randomized, manufacturer company IDs in BLE advertising frames are mandatory and immutable."

………

Pointing out other abuses associated with Meta's AI glasses, and Meta's reported plan to add facial recognition to its glasses, Jeanrenaud said, "This is not a perfect solution, but I hope it's useful for someone. Until consent and privacy are treated seriously in wearable tech, I hope this tool helps someone feel a little more safe."

Seeing as how the app is open source, it seems to me that you could add some features, things like projecting Goatse onto the lenses.  (If you do not know what Goatse is, don't click through)

A Plan So Cunning You Could Put a Tail on It and Call It Weasel

Get in. We're messing up Melania's Amazon search results
byu/mulcahey inesist

The Pitch

The Cover Art

The blurb.

Over on Reddit, someone has made a wonderful suggestion, that we all go to Amazon, and that we all, "Amplify the paranormal erotic thriller novel Melania: Devourer of Men so it ranks higher than her movie," on Amazon.

The eBook is free on kindle, so you can download it, and boost the algorithm, so that when someone searches for, Melania the documentary, they get this book instead.

This act is generally called, "Google Bombing," though in this case, it would be Amazon bombing.

Classic examples of Google bombing, are sucessful efforts to make the search for "Miserable failure," giving the result of George W. Bush, and the word, "Santorum," giving the result, "The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex." 

Surely we can do the same to Melania. 

Gee, Ya Think?

In admitting the obvious, Dell Computer has announced changes to its PC lineup because said customers hate AI features with a white-hot burning passion.

Reading this room did not require much of a stretch. 

The tech industry’s insistence on cramming AI into virtually every aspect of their consumer-facing offerings, from AI apps you can’t uninstall to hallucinating assistants that nobody asked for, has been nothing short of insufferable.

Tech enthusiasts and average consumers alike have watched helplessly as software and hardware they rely on to research, work, game, and keep in touch have turned into testing grounds for unproven AI tech — often without their consent.

………

Thankfully, vendors are finally starting to pay attention. As PCGamer reports, Windows PC maker Dell admitted at this year’s CES that things have really gotten out of hand.

Their executives are willing to say the quiet part out loud — that nobody is scrambling to buy an “AI PC.”

“One thing you’ll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first,” Dell’s head of product, Kevin Terwilliger, said during a pre-CES briefing, as quoted by the publication. “So, a bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC.”

………

The fact that Dell is worried its AI-first approach may be hindering it from reaching new customers and making new sales, though, is telling.

Beyond Terwilliger’s eureka moment, Dell also admitted at CES that killing off its much-beloved line of XPS laptops was a mistake, officially reviving it for 2026 — and judging by the elated reactions the move has garnered, it was likely the right move.

If you war wondering if regular consumers are sick and tired of bogus hallucinating "Artificial Intelligence" features in their every day work, the answer is not just, :ye," but the answer is, "Fuck yes."

Gee, Ya Think?

I'm not a big fan of corporate consultants.  

Mostly, they state the3 blatantly obvious, and give permission for companies to behave unethically (I'm looking at you, McKinsey)  and charge millions of dollars for this.

That being said, Gartner just stated the obvious and provided a very real public service when they recommended that companies not use AI browsers because their security is complete pants.

Everyone with half a brain should know this, but everyone is also afraid that they will be blamed for causing the tulip AI mania to collapse, so they remain silent:

Agentic browsers are too risky for most organizations to use, according to analyst firm Gartner.

The firm offered that advice last week in a new advisory titled “Cybersecurity Must Block AI Browsers for Now,” in which research VP Dennis Xu, senior director analyst Evgeny Mirolyubov, and VP analyst John Watts observe “Default AI browser settings prioritize user experience over security.”

The analysts’ definition of an AI browser encompasses tools like Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas that include two elements:

• An “AI sidebar” that offers users the chance to summarize, search, translate, and interact with web content using AI services provided by the browser’s developer
• An agentic transaction capability that allows the browser to autonomously navigate, interact with, and complete tasks on websites, especially within authenticated web sessions.

………

But if you decide the back-end AI is too risky, Gartner recommends blocking users from downloading or installing AI browsers.

Gartner’s fears about the agentic capabilities of AI browser relate to their susceptibility to “indirect prompt-injection-induced rogue agent actions, inaccurate reasoning-driven erroneous agent actions, and further loss and abuse of credentials if the AI browser is deceived into autonomously navigating to a phishing website.”

Shorter version:  AI browsers are a Petri dish for phishing. 

How Can They Both Lose?

In this case, the entities in conflict are Amazon and Perplexity.

The former is a retail and eCommerce giant, and the latter is one of the increasingly ubiquitous AI companies.

Amazon has sent demand letters demanding that Perplexity stop offering its users access to its comparison shopping comparison features on Amazon.

Amazon is claiming that this is insecure, and Perplexity is claiming that Amazon does not want its users to find better deals which make Jeff Bezos' monster less money, including showing them non-Amazon sources for things that they want to buy.

Both accusations are probably true.

Amazon has told Perplexity to get its agentic browser out of its online store, the companies both confirmed publicly on Tuesday. After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist letter, Perplexity wrote in a blog post titled “Bullying is not innovation.”

“This week, Perplexity received an aggressive legal threat from Amazon, demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon. This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users,” Perplexity lamented in the blog post.

Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

………

If Amazon is to be believed, then Perplexity could simply identify its agent and start shopping. Of course, the risk is that Amazon, which has its own shopping bot called Rufus, could also block Comet — or any other third-party agentic shopper — from its site.

Amazon suggests as much as its statement, which also says, “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.”

Perplexity claims that Amazon would block the shopping bot because Amazon wants to sell advertising and product placements. Unlike human shoppers, a bot tasked with buying a new laundry basket presumably wouldn’t find itself buying a more expensive one, or getting lured into buying the latest Brandon Sanderson novel and a new set of earphones (on sale!).

What Perplexity is doing is creating the sort of "lite" version of the adversarial interoperability proposed by Corey Doctorow.

It's pretty likely that the DMCA prevents this, which is all the more reason to abolish the DMCA.

The 9 Billion Names of God

One of the failed former CEOs of Intel is working to facilitate the return of Jesus through AI.

So basically, he's looking to rapture the world using artificial intelligence.

You know, it seems to me that I might see part of the recent problems that Intel has had.

In March, three months after being forced out of his position as the CEO of Intel and sued by shareholders, Patrick Gelsinger took the reins at Gloo, a technology company made for what he calls the “faith ecosystem” – think Salesforce for churches, plus chatbots and AI assistants for automating pastoral work and ministry support.

The former CEO’s career pivot is taking place as the US tech industry returns to the political realm as a major revenue stream. Some of its most prominent present-day leaders have funded Donald Trump’s re-election and renewed their pursuit of government contracts as the second Trump administration has revitalized religious conservatism in Washington DC.

Now Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology (who’s largely free of the shareholder suit), Gelsinger has made it a core mission to soft-power advance the company’s Christian principles in Silicon Valley, the halls of Congress and beyond, armed with a fundraised war chest of $110m. His call to action is also a pitch for AI aligned with Christian values: tech products like those built by Gloo, many of which are built on top of existing large language models, but adjusted to reflect users’ theological beliefs.

“My life mission has been [to] work on a piece of technology that would improve the quality of life of every human on the planet and hasten the coming of Christ’s return,” he said.

This reminds me of an Arthur C. Clarke short story.

I F$#@ing Hate Windows F%$#ing 11

I'm using it on my work (work from home) computer, and literally every change that they have made to the interface is worse.

From the fakkede Start Menu, to the narrow scroll bars, the enshittified start menu search, centering the task bar (I fixed that one), the increase in adware, etc.

Microsoft has done everything but  give me a paper cut and put lemon juice in it.

Something to Confirm with My Computer Programmer Reader(s)

I was doing some programming/database work today, relatively simple stuff, basically a not very procedural report generator and cleaning up a database.

When I was done, I realized that I do not feel like myself when I have done this.

This is distinct from engineering problems, where, even if it is percolating through my head in the background for days, I still feel like me.

It takes about 2 hours before I feel like me again.

Anyone else have this experience. 

Not a Surprise

AI generated code quality
byu/lastwarriorpl inProgrammerHumor

Seems About Right

I am not at all surprised that a study has shown that AI tools made software development significantly slower.

Gee, hoocoodanode? 

When it comes to concrete use cases for large language models, AI companies love to point out the ways coders and software developers can use these models to increase their productivity and overall efficiency in creating computer code. However, a new randomized controlled trial has found that experienced open source coders became less efficient at coding-related tasks when they used current AI tools.

For their study, researchers at METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) recruited 16 software developers, each with multiple years of experience working on specific open source repositories. The study followed these developers across 246 individual "tasks" involved with maintaining those repos, such as "bug fixes, features, and refactors that would normally be part of their regular work." For half of those tasks, the developers used AI tools like Cursor Pro or Anthropic's Claude; for the others, the programmers were instructed not to use AI assistance. Expected time forecasts for each task (made before the groupings were assigned) were used as a proxy to balance out the overall difficulty of the tasks in each experimental group, and the time needed to fix pull requests based on reviewer feedback was included in the overall assessment.

………

These factors lead the researchers to conclude that current AI coding tools may be particularly ill-suited to "settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g., relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn." While those factors may not apply in "many realistic, economically relevant settings" involving simpler code bases, they could limit the impact of AI tools in this study and similar real-world situations.

Apparently, I Am Not Sufficiently Cynical

I knew that part of the remit of the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ and his evil DOGE minions was to break down walls between all government databases in order to create a panopticon, but I did not expect them to outsource the data analysis to literal vampire Peter Thiel.  (I mean literal.  He has been involved with efforts to consume the blood of young people to extend his own life)

Once again, reality has outdone the worst than I can imagine:

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Un-dirtyword-believable. 

Quote of the Day

My basic test for whether a general purpose humanoid robot would be useful, well, generally, is whether or not it can clear my table, load my dishwasher, and then put the dishes away. I don't mean that's the most important task I can imagine, just that if it can do tasks like that, it would fit the fantasy, and if it can't, it's pretty useless. And once you try to imagine one doing that, I think you can see how that's... well... hard.

—Duncan "Atrios" Black

It really is a bit of a mind-f%$# that a random economist with a popular blog better understands the nature of reality than tech bro "sooper geniuses" out there like Musk, Andreeson, Altman, Pichai, and Zuckerberg.

They think that adding to the excrement that LLM artificial intelligence models are churning out, and then feeding the aforementioned excrement back into their LLM artificial intelligence models will somehow or other create something meaningful and useful, because all they know is how to throw money and random data at a model.

To quote Dick Feynmann, "Reality cannot be fooled."

How About Throwing Tim Cook in Jail?

The good folks at Wired note that the malicious compliance with regard to federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers order loosening Apple's control of its app ecosystem may constitute criminal contempt and that the judge has accused Apple finance VP Alex Roman of lying under oath.

Yeah, criminal contempt, that's the ticket.  Just have Apple to pay a few pennies in fines and perhaps issuing another order that they will subvert will stop this behavior.

Sorry, if Roman attempted to deceive the court, that's perjury, and it is clear that he did so with the approval of Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Jail them.  Even if it's only for a weekend, throw their flabby white asses in jail:

Apple “willfully chose not to comply” with a court order to loosen its app store restrictions—and one of its executives lied under oath about the company’s plans, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has referred the situation to the US Attorney’s Office in San Francisco “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”

………

Apple pursued its noncompliance strategy “with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her ruling on Wednesday. “That it thought this court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”

She also said that Apple executives tried to hide the real motivations for the changes. “In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option,” Gonzalez Rogers said. She went as far as accusing Alex Roman, a vice president of finance at Apple, of lying during testimony in which he talked about how Apple came to its decision to go with a 27 percent commission on purchases made outside the App Store. “The testimony of Mr. Roman was replete with misdirection and outright lies,” the judge said.

………

Citing internal Apple documents from 2023, Gonzalez Rogers said Apple’s App Store chief Phillip Schiller “had advocated that Apple comply with the injunction” but that CEO Tim Cook “ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.”

No, Cook decided to subvert the court order and he encouraged Apple executives to lie under oath.

That is suborning perjury, and it's a felony.

 

 

This Ain't Good

We now have reports that Elon Musk's merry band of vandals have download sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

By "Sensitive Information" I mean confidential legal discussions, the names of whistle blowers, and list of labor organizers.

Any guess as to what the famously union averse Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is going to do with this information?

In the first days of March, a team of advisers from President Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency initiative arrived at the Southeast Washington, D.C., headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board.

The small, independent federal agency investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices. It stores reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.

………

But according to an official whistleblower disclosure shared with Congress and other federal overseers that was obtained by NPR, subsequent interviews with the whistleblower and records of internal communications, technical staff members were alarmed about what DOGE engineers did when they were granted access, particularly when those staffers noticed a spike in data leaving the agency. It's possible that the data included sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases and corporate secrets — data that four labor law experts tell NPR should almost never leave the NLRB and that has nothing to do with making the government more efficient or cutting spending.

Meanwhile, according to the disclosure and records of internal communications, members of the DOGE team asked that their activities not be logged on the system and then appeared to try to cover their tracks behind them, turning off monitoring tools and manually deleting records of their access — evasive behavior that several cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR compared to what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.

(Emphasis mine)

Criminals acting like criminals.  It should be noted here that this shows that Elon Musk's Evil Minions™ had specific criminal intent, which makes prosecution under statutes like the CFPA much easier. (I offer the caveat that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit! ⃰)

The employees grew concerned that the NLRB's confidential data could be exposed, particularly after they started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia, according to the disclosure. Eventually, the disclosure continued, the IT department launched a formal review of what it deemed a serious, ongoing security breach or potentially illegal removal of personally identifiable information. The whistleblower believes that the suspicious activity warrants further investigation by agencies with more resources, like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the FBI.

The labor law experts interviewed by NPR fear that if the data gets out, it could be abused, including by private companies with cases before the agency that might get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data on competitors — Musk's SpaceX among them. It could also intimidate whistleblowers who might speak up about unfair labor practices, and it could sow distrust in the NLRB's independence, they said.  

The new revelations about DOGE's activities at the labor agency come from a whistleblower in the IT department of the NLRB, who disclosed his concerns to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in a detailed report that was then provided to NPR. Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.

Elon's thugs are not just criminals, they are terrorists.

They need to be treated as such.

^*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Things that I Never Thought that I Would Write

Apple Did the Right Thing.

Specifically, instead of adding a back door into their end to end encryption as demanded by UK authorities, they have pulled the service from the island nation.

Adding a back door for law enforcement adds a back door that could be accessed by any malefactor who wants you data:

Apple disabled its most secure data storage offering for new customers in Britain on Friday rather than comply with a secret government order that would have allowed police and intelligence agencies to access the encrypted content.

The order under the country’s Investigatory Powers Act, reported by The Washington Post two weeks ago, requires the California maker of iPhones and Mac computers to create a backdoor capability allowing authorities to snoop on iCloud storage anywhere in the world.

That would nullify the technology in Apple’s Advanced Data Protection service, which provides such strong encryption that the company itself is unable to retrieve users’ information. Apple rolled out that optional end-to-end encryption globally starting in late 2022.

Compromised security, even when complying with law enforcement, makes for less security. 

It is likely to actually result in more crime, because criminals know that they will have easier access.

Good Move from ……… Georgia?

I am referring to the, "Peach State," and not the former Soviet Republic on the Black Sea.

Their PUC just issued a rule allowing Georgia Power to charge data centers higher rates for electricity.

Considering the negative externalities of data centers, this is a very good idea:

Metro Atlanta is one of the hottest destinations in the country for tech companies to build data centers, hulking warehouses filled with servers that power web services, cryptocurrency transactions and increasingly, artificial intelligence.

But the facilities themselves use huge amounts of electricity, and concern has been growing that their demands could strain the grid and drive up costs for residential customers and other businesses.

On Thursday, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved changes to Georgia Power’s rules and contract provisions commissioners say will make sure data centers pay their fair share and keep other customers from being saddled with their costs.

………

The changes were proposed by Georgia Power in December and apply to new customers that use more than 100 megawatts of electricity.

………

Already, Georgia Power has been approved to build new oil- and gas-burning units, add massive battery storage systems and buy power from coal and gas plants in other states, largely to meet a wave of data-center demand the company contends is coming.

Those projects, along with building new transmission lines to deliver the power, carry enormous costs, which some fear could be passed on to the company’s other customers, whose rates have shot up dramatically in recent years. Since late 2022, the PSC has approved a series of rate increases that have pushed the average Georgia Power customer’s bill up by about $43, according to data from the company.

Nice to see the big players being made to paid some of the costs that they inflict on the rest of us.  (That's the definition of, "Negative Externalities.)