Apple – Page 2 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Apple and Google Still Generating Profits from Grok’s Sexualized Image Generation

It’s my rule. I’ll break it if I want.

Rules are made to be broken is the cliché. That’s a theme that’s running louder and wilder through much of life these days. Build complicated and successful things. Create rules to protect what you’ve built. Mass enough power and then bend or ignore the rules when they become inconvenient.

That theme surfaces frequently enough that it’s almost a meme. In politics it happens every day, enough to make a mocking myth of things like the rule of law and the constitution. We see it in religion. We see it in business, too frequently in the business of tech. When you’re big enough that you have to, and can create rules to protect what you’ve built against others, and yourself, you substitute the convenience of adhering to the rules for the inconvenience of principle.

Back in January, (damn that seems so long ago), Elon Musk’s Grok released an AI image editing feature that allowed users to create nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. It was ugly and disgusting.

As with all new things tech, it caught on like wildfire, and then X took fire from many quarters including some governments. (Not ours — caterwauling congress critters no longer count.) Apple and Google also took hits for continuing to allow the app on their respective App stores in violation of existing rules. There were calls for both Apple and Google to follow those rules and take the app down. Something both companies have done for other rule violating apps with and without public punity.

That didn’t happen.

Yesterday, a report from NBC revealed that Apple, in a letter to U.S. Senators, claimed that it worked behind the scenes of the public uproar to demand that the developers “create a plan to improve content moderation.” According to The Verge,

Throughout this covert back-and-forth, Grok and X appear to have remained live on the App Store, a drawn-out process that may help explain the confusing, haphazard rollout of moderation changes announced in real time. This included limiting Grok on X to paying subscribers and attempting to stop Grok from undressing women. Our investigations revealed that neither were particularly effective beyond making the tool a bit harder to access. Later interventions, like X letting users block Grok from editing their photos, are also easily circumvented.

Despite Apple’s approval and xAI’s claims it has tightened safeguards, Grok still appears to be able to generate sexualized deepfakes with relative ease.

So, essentially nothing of any real effect happened. Scratch that. Something did. X and Grok put the feature behind a paying subscription. One that Apple also reaped profits from and still does. As does Google.

The one rule this era has taught us is that if you’re big and rich enough, and can weather the storm of public scorn, you can essentially ignore the rules. Even those you’ve written yourself. With impunity.

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.

MacBook NEO: Had To Happen Eventually

New adventures

As I mentioned when Apple first introduced the MacBook NEO, it wasn’t going to be the laptop for me. I also mentioned that at a point sooner or later, one of the folks I support was going to want one, and I’d end up purchasing and setting it up for them. Today was that point.

I’ll do the drudge work (OS updates, etc…) of getting it up and running this afternoon and we’ll set things up the way they want this weekend.

Should be interesting.

Taking Flight On A Glasswing

With the fragility of egos as a pilot

Every time I hear the warnings about the current or next big thing in Artificial Intelligence, I’m reminded of the Surgeon General’s warnings that are printed on packs of cigarettes. I’m also reminded of every new fad I’ve seen in my lifetime, that might have inched over into a trend, but eventually ended up waiting for its turn on the nostalgia wheel of time.

Claude mythos.

As the world was holding its breath from the civilization destroying threats that sprung forth from the mind of the U.S. President, and then exhaling as they turned into the latest episode of “Bluff, Bluster, and Bullshit,” we were learning about a new AI leap and threat from Anthropic, potentially as dire, called Claude Mythos Preview. To get ahead of any damage this coming attraction might visit upon us Anthropic created Project Glasswing. Given that the raving lunatic in the White House came to power a second time with a civilization destroying manual in hand called Project 2025, I’m more than a bit leery of anything with a title that leads with the word “Project.”

From what I’ve read, Mythos is the latest innovation in Anthropic’s flavor of Artificial Intelligence. It is so powerful that it has sought out and found vulnerabilities in so much of the software the world runs on, that Anthropic is only releasing it to a hand full of companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Broadcom, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, NVIDIA, and more.) That’s Project Glasswing. Tech overlords uniting to protect us from their sloppy software. (The lawyers will have a field day.)

Anthropic, having been declared by the U.S. as an unacceptable national security threat and supply chain risk, nevertheless is also working with the same U.S. Government looking ahead to the threats. Somehow security and existential threats always seem to become negotiating partners with their foes when money is at stake. Also occasionally when global annihilation is knocking on the door.

The way I interpret the idea behind Project Glasswing is that these companies, and presumably governments, might use Mythos to seek out all of the vulnerabilities, and perhaps obliterate them (I use that term in the Trumpian and Hegsethian sense) before they can filter down into things like power grids, banking systems, and consumer use. It can supposedly do this at a scale humans can’t. Note that Mythos discovered problems in every operating system and, on a level both big and small, the constantly updating browsers we use on our computers.

During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so. The vulnerabilities it finds are often subtle or difficult to detect.

I think of it this way. Announcing the existence of Mythos is akin to living the moments of terror those responsible for our safety have in House of Dynamite, once they realize the gig is up, misses are inbound, and the interceptors have failed. I’d call it an “Oh, shit” moment.

If you ask me Mythos is also exposing more than a few myths as well as vulnerabilities. The sound you hear is PR slide decks about security enhancements in the latest releases of current software being furiously redone.

As M.G. Siegler puts it,

Historically, many vulnerabilities have been fixed only after someone exploited them in some way. Again, that’s because the incentives are in favor of the attacker versus the defender. If and when Mythos-caliber tools are put in the hands of hackers… yeah.

That’s obviously exactly why Anthropic isn’t releasing Mythos to the public and also why they’ve set up Glasswing. While the company may be first to such capabilities, they won’t be the last. They probably don’t even have long to try to get ahead of the situation. While I generally dislike the nuclear weapons analogy for AI, I must admit, this all does feel a bit Manhattan Project-y. The good guys are racing against the clock to implement a new technology before the bad guys catch up. But they will. They always do.

Yeah, that sounds problematic.

Paul Krugman took a break from agonizing and writing about the situation in the Middle East and weighed in with this,

The good news is that Anthropic discovered in the process of developing Claude Mythos that the A.I. could not only write software code more easily and with greater complexity than any model currently available, but as a byproduct of that capability, it could also find vulnerabilities in virtually all of the world’s most popular software systems more easily than before.

The bad news is that if this tool falls into the hands of bad actors, they could hack pretty much every major software system in the world, including all those made by the companies in the consortium.

So, there’s plenty of doom floating around, along with the now clichéd approach to all things AI, that there’s good tech behind all of the bad things that the tech can do. Note that the profits from tobacco helped found the U.S. and twisted science and politics into knots trying not to end up on the ash heap.

I’ve largely stayed away from playing with any of these AI tools and toys, but I follow the news of the advances on all fronts, and those who do play around with it. Like it or not, those who run the world have decided this is our future.

I’ll be honest. Hallucinations aside, I don’t know enough rather or not to trust the software. I have my doubts and I do have fears about the tech. Project Glasswing might be a noble effort. Yet, with a clear mind, I do know enough not to trust any of the humans running the show. Frankly, it feels like they don’t know enough to trust the software either, much less to protect their and our systems from being destroyed by some kid in a basement.

As Natasha MH puts it, not writing about Mythos specifically, but about Artificial Intelligence in general, AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.

Sunday Morning Reading

A basket of good writing to share

For those who celebrate Easter and Passover, and all who do not celebrate either, may you find some bit of peace on this Sunday morning, however you see yourself and the world. I’d like to say this week’s edition of Sunday Morning Reading is filled with Easter eggs, but instead it’s just the usual basket stuffed with links to interesting topics and stories that I like to share. Enjoy.

It’s good to be seen, certainly the way you see yourself. When seen by someone who doesn’t know you, that’s eye-opening. Check out Natasha MH’s The Taxi Driver Knew.

The war that isn’t a war in Iran continues. Whatever that story is, it is still being written. Given that this might be heading to the culmination of a conflict that has simmered, and occasionally boiled over, for decades if not longer, there are a few stories out there that offer preface. He Helped Stop Iran From Getting The Bomb by David D. Kirkpatrick is one worth reading.

JA Westenberg’s The “Passive Income” Trap Ate A Generation of Entrepreneurs is also one heckuva a read. There’s nothing passive about this take.

Seva Gunitsky takes on The Incel Global Order. Somebody needs to.

As the technology we use advances, in some spheres some are stepping back. Joshua Cohen takes a look in Sweden Goes Back To Basics, Swapping Screens For Books In The Classroom.

Social Media is under the microscope again after two recent court verdicts against Meta. Chris Castle takes a look with The Social Media Verdicts Are In. Now Ask The Hard Question: Where Was The Board? Counting the money, I imagine. Hat tip to Stan Stewart for this one.

In the category of no easy answers, Mathew Ingram also examines what’s going on in social media with Social Media May Be Bad For You But The Remedy Could Be Worse.

On the Artificial Intelligence front there are always interesting topics cooking as the AI purveyors cook the planet. I wrote about two fascinating pieces yesterday, and today I’m highlighting Angela Fu’s An AI Company Set Out To Fix News Deserts. Instead, It Copied Local Journalists Work. Something tells me we’re going to be seeing more of this going forward.

Apple is, I assume, winding up its week celebrating its 50th Anniversary. So much has been written on that topic because there is indeed much to celebrate and much history to contemplate while looking ahead. Here are four pieces that caught my eye, the first three primarily because they are more personal than historical, the fourth is a look ahead.

John Moltz gives us Missed Connections: Me and Apple.

James Thomson is one of my favorite Apple developers. His Apple At 50: Gonna Be, Gonna Be Golden is indeed a personal journey.

Adam and Tonya Engst have been writing Tidbits since 1990. I started reading it shortly thereafter. What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses is certainly different than most, but one that mirrors the thoughts of many on this anniversary.

And Marco Arment, looking ahead, has penned A Letter To John Ternus, the guy everyone assumes will don the CEO mantle in the future.

Baseball is back. And every team and their fans are dreaming of a championship. David Todd McCarty spins a bit of fiction that’s baseball adjacent, but rooted deep in dreams in The Taste Of A Dream.

To conclude this week, this story by Audrey Pachuta very much sums up the contradictions we’re living through at the moment. Check out A Student Set A Goal To Run Every Street In Chicago And Inspired A City. Now He Must Leave The Country.

May you find peace however you can.

(Photo from the author.)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.

Looks Like Thaw Will Be A Good Menu Bar Manager Solution For Mac OS 26

Melting the Ice

I use a lot of Menu Bar apps on my Macs. It looks like I may have found a new solution to managing those apps.

I had previously used Bartender to manage those, especially on the MacBook Air with a notch. But since the release of macOS 26, Bartender had run into some difficulties. I gave macOS 26’s new way of handling Menu Bar items a try, and that just didn’t work for me. I experimented with a few other Menu Bar managers and for a while settled on Ice.

Like Bartender, Ice also had its issues, and its developer has since halted updates. Turns out there’s an app that melts those issues away. It’s called Thaw.

Thaw, created by stonerl, is an open source fork of Ice, so much of what it offers is familiar and you can import your Ice settings. This article by Jannis explains why Ice, and I presume Bartender, ran into difficulties managing Menu Bar items.

So far things are working as expected. The idea is to hide Menu Bar icons that I don’t access frequently, yet make them available with a quick cursor flick to the Menu Bar.

As a side note on this, with the debut of macOS 26, it appeared Apple made was beginning to shift users away from using Menu Bar apps, favoring the Control Panel instead. I could easily get on board with that shift, but very few apps I use actually make Control Panel access available without creating a Shortcut to launch the app. That seems like a waste of time, but perhaps more apps will make accessing them through the Control Panel possible when we move to macOS 27.

Yo! Companies on the Web: Find The Courage To Say Never

Always say Never

Years ago when Apple and others started allowing websites viewed in a browser to send notifications I knew we were headed to the mess things eventually turned into.

CleanShot 2026-03-31 at 14.26.

Sure, you can turn off notifications from individual websites, and I do. But in reality that’s just another wack-a-mole game that takes advantage of most users not having the time or wanting to do the necessary pruning. Whether websites are asking you to subscribe, or receive notifications it doesn’t really matter. Website notifications are just another fart noise on the enshittified web that stinks up the joint.

You’d think that website publishers would actually want to know who they turn off with their tactics, but that’s probably too much truth to handle. “Hey, boss. The majority of our users never want to see a notification from us.”

In my opinion, there’s an easy way to do so if companies have the guts to face the truth. Just add a button on any of those drop down notifications that says “Never.”

Sunday Morning Reading

There be dragons, dogs, and humans. Trust the dogs.

Time for some Sunday Morning Reading.

There’s a great lyric and greater question in Lin-Manuel’s musical retelling of American history, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Control is a crazy concept. We strive to control what we can, while we’re around. Too often we delude ourselves into thinking we control more than we actually do. No one wants to define themselves or be defined as lacking control, much less under the control of others. We may think we’re masters and mistresses of our own universes and control our own narrative. Yet too often, when we do have control and things go askew, we foist the responsibility (blame) off on others. That may be essential to surviving on the paths we choose. But it’s not easy to control the reactions a dog may have to who’s good or who’s not, a dragon, or much less the demons of our own making.

Shutterstock 1766228261.

Kicking off this week is Natasha MH asking the question, What’s The Best Story You’ve Been Told About Yourself? There be dragons.

The Guardian published an editorial on the ‘unmasking’ of anonymous artists in the wake of the second unmasking of Bansky and the reveal of a hoax surrounding the death of Italian novelist writing under the nom-de-plume Elena Ferrante. Regarding Banksy, The Guardian opines that “his mask is his art — let’s not destroy it.”

I don’t often link to book reviews in this column, but this one struck my fancy. A.O. Scott’s A Treacherous Secret Agent, examines How Literature Spoke Truth To Power During The Red Scare. I’m looking forward to reading this.

Jason Perlow’s The Well We Never Tapped is a sequel to an earlier piece he wrote about the future of science fiction. He argues that in the runaway world of big sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars the answer to controlling the future of these and other properties isn’t retooling or reimagining, but perhaps to stop for a while.

Speaking of science fiction and stopping, on the Artificial Intelligence front a number of things happening in that wannabe industry that can’t really find a purchase beyond the flimflammery of the financial markets and bean counting boardrooms, have been prompting some interesting writing of late. kstenerud on the yoloai blog writes Why Your AI Agents Will Turn Against You. There be lobsters and dragons.

Kevin Baker takes a look at how AI Got The Blame For The Iran School Bombing. Follow that up with Anna Moore’s piece Marriage Over, €100,000 Down The Drain: The AI Users Whose Lives Were Wrecked By Delusion. Makes one suspect that we’re not looking for ways to better exert control over our lives, but to more easily avoid taking the rap when things inevitably go wrong.

Big news last week got kind of mushed about in wish casting about Facebook killing off the Metaverse. That sort of did and didn’t happen. Regardless, Neil Stephenson’s My Prodigal Brainchild caught quite a bit of attention.

Apple is celebrating its 50 year anniversary and there’s lots being written about its history and it’s present. Everyone’s vying for control of that story. Harry McCracken’s How Apple Became Apple: The Definitive Oral History Of The Company’s Earliest Days is worth a read.

So too is David Sparks’ The MacBook Neo’s Unfair Advantage and the Stephen Sinofsky piece he links to, Mac Neo And My Afternoon Of Reflection and Melancholy. The damn thing hasn’t even been on sale for a month, yet we’re already trying to define its legacy.

Two political pieces to conclude with after all of the good feelings surrounding yesterday’s No Kings Rallies. (Watch for the comical battle to control the narrative over that moment this week.) Lydia Polgreen says what I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It’s Not Trump, It’s America. It’s hard to come out from under the burden of a myth.

Mike Lofgren’s How Trump Fits The “Great Man” Theory of History — Sort Of, taps into Hegel, Asimov, and the wisdom of dogs. He concludes his piece with:

History as we experience it at the sharp end is the aggregation of moral choices made by individual human beings. When those choices become corrupted by fear, resentment or inexcusable stupidity, and then amplified by mass suggestion, we get a creature like Trump, the reflection of a people’s image.

I’ll leave it at that this week.

(Image from Daniele Gay on Shutterstock

Apple Pulls The Plug On The Mac Pro

Something, something, something about writing on the wall

Apple is finally pulling the plug on the Mac Pro, long after the water was drained out that tub.

Id mac pro 2019.

According to reports the Mac Pro no longer appears on Apple’s website and Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer that line of hardware going forward.

The end of the product line is less of a surprise than the fact that Apple was still selling Mac Pros up until today. It’s a move that has been obvious ever since the advent of the Mac Studio in the Apple silicon era began replacing the high end desktop for high end customers.

Farewell and adieu.

AntiFreeze: A Web Based Solution To Track ICE

Life and the web finds a way

Remember ICEBlock? The app created for iPhone users to track and alert others of ICE activities nearby? You know the one that Apple and Google blocked. There were several others that got blocked as well.

In this moment of something new and horrible to distract attention from the latest happening almost every hour, ICE activities might have faded from the headlines, but those activities haven’t ceased.

joshuahacks has created a progressive web app called AntiFreeze. From his post on Daily Kos:

AntiFreeze lets anyone anonymously report an ICE sighting. When someone submits a report, every user within five miles gets a push notification on their phone in real time. If ICE is spotted four blocks from your house while you’re making dinner, your phone buzzes and tells you.

But it’s not just alerts… Open the app and you can see a map or list of every reported sighting within 25 miles from the last 72 hours. So even if you missed a notification, you can check what’s been happening in your area before you head to work, drop your kids off at school, or go to the grocery store.

No login. No account. No personal data collected. Completely anonymous.

You can read all about it and find out how to use it on that post. As the developer and author says, “It works. It’s free. And nobdy can take it away from you.”

Who’d a thunk that the web could be the answer?

(images are from screenshots of The AntiFreeze app and website

Sunday Morning Reading

Life is a roll of the loaded dice

Nostalgia can be a mind fuck. Democracy, journalism, personal computing, they all feel like games with rules we all understood. No longer. Yes, the house always wins. Especially when everything feels like a war we’re not sure is beginning of ending. When all bets are off if feels more like sticking your head in the mouth of a tiger than a roll of the dice. Yet we play on. Time for a little Sunday Morning Reading.

Eyestetix studio m0EzHtexapU unsplash.

Kicking off is an excellent piece from JA Westenberg called Everything’s Casino. From Iran to the Dutch tulip crisis, with a dash of Dostoevsky. The section on When The Future Stopped Arriving is aces.

Follow that up Jon Ganz’s Command-Shift-War. Snake eyes.

Spend some time with this terrific series from Quinn Norton on Emptywheel that began a little over a year ago with A Normal Person’s Explainer On What Generative AI Is And Does. It concludes with an epilogue that is titled Small Models, Gently Loved, and subtitled An AI Speculative Fiction. It won’t spoil the rest of the series, so I’d suggest starting with that fictional epilogue, but also checking out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

John Gruber and Manton Reece both linked to this piece by Les Orchard called Grief And The AI Spit. I’m glad they did. You will be too.

Orchard’s piece above kicks off talking about how making computers do things is fun. Which is a nice companion to Sam Henri Gold’s reaction to Apple releasing the MacBook Neo called This Is Not The Computer For You. There’s nostalgia there, certainly. But I think it’s deeper than that. I’m betting Apple’s stake in the next game is solid.

Speaking of gambling, McKay Coppins was staked by his bosses at The Atlantic to a year long escapade to dive into the rise of gambling. His piece Sucker, tells the tale of his year as a degenerative gambler.

There’s an excellent series worth your attention from various writers on The Verge titled AI vs. The Pentagon: Killer Robots, Mass Surveillance, and The Red Lines. We sure are betting the farm on this, aren’t we?

If not advertising, then now what? That’s the question Hamilton Nolan poses in Patrons of Journalism.

In a piece on democracy dating back a few years, David Todd McCarty sticks his and our heads in the mouth of the tiger in Dreaming of Tigers. The house and the tiger always win.

(Image from Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash.)