Notices by Ian Brown 👨🏻‍💻 (1br0wn@eupolicy.social)

#Apple's #News+ is just a pile of 💩

It has a reasonable selection of articles and newspapers, but:

* Shows horrible, clunky ads in the middle of stories 🤬
* Insists on continuing to show articles from rags I've explicitly blocked, like the Torygraph 🤬
* Destroys the relationship between news media and their readers, no doubt to their great disadvantage in the long run 🤬🤬

Free trial cancelled! Thank FSM for the Financial Times subscription!

Trump “create an America—in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge.” https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/06/david-frum-showwhy-are-the-media-so-afraid-of-trump/683029/

@quillmatiq Do we know what Signal’s plan is when Trump leans on his pal Bezos to shut down their (I’ve been told) AWS-based services?

#Signal is becoming critical national infrastructure around the world 👏

Next, we need genuine Signal #decentralisation (not dependency on messaging queue servers controlled by a US-exposed organisation, making heavy use of #AWS) 🙏

2. #BridgyFed is making open systems increasingly seamless. I don’t even need to use #Openvibe any more, except to post to #Nostr. I just post here, then interact with the increasing numbers of bridges users on #Bluesky 😍

Rejoice! The battle for #interoperability in #BigTech systems is almost won…

1. #Beeper and #Openvibe are single-handedly implementing messaging and social media interop. I’ve moved my few remaining conversations away from #iMessage to #Signal or #WhatsApp.

@toddz @ArmchairEgyptologist @EUCommission Full details here https://www.ianbrown.tech/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Security-privacy-and-the-European-Commissions-proposed-iOS-interoperability-requirements-for-connected-devices-under-the-Digital-Markets-Act.pdf

Had to check that one wasn’t @theonion
From: @feed
https://www.404media.co/closure-ink-ai-chatbot-ghosted-ex/

Sure #ICC staff will all be delighted to use a Linux distribution with zero exposure to the US and its allies, or secondary sanctions. Ditto an Office replacement. Anything else? 🤡
From: @WaywardTarheel
https://mastodon.social/@WaywardTarheel/114513400291891517

If you are an occasional #Signal user on your iPhone, you might want to check the app now.

#Apple seems to have further tightened the #iOS strangulation of resources to rarely used apps, so much so that Signal cannot even provide a notification there is a message waiting.

A number of friends -- even a professor of computer science at Cambridge of my acquaintance 🫣 -- have entirely missed important messages from me due to this.

The @EUCommission has ordered Apple to fix this under the #DMA 👏🏻

NICE! @ivory now showing proper previews of Bluesky links, looking just like a quote-post of a native Fediverse post! #Interoperability for the win! /cc @wavesblog

I have two hypotheses why the conventional IO/competition economics view of #interoperability understates its benefits, perhaps due to slight technological complexity in understanding its potential:

1. Fully interoperable tools can be plugged together in all sorts of unexpected combinations. See eg #Unix or #bridgyfed

2. Interoperability lets a single function (eg auto-translation) be developed once in a single tool, then applied across a range of interoperable services. /1

#AI refuseniks of the world, unite! "I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views." h/t @tforcworc https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzdjqxo

@ianbrown.tech Hi @pfefferle! Love love love your #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress! 😍

Any thoughts on this thread? Thanks! https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2cxgdrgtsmrbqnjkwyplmp43/post/3lns5xetjek27

‘Universities such as #Columbia, with its 87 Nobel laureates, are global public goods, reliant on the American ecosystem. Much of their research couldn’t be done elsewhere. Bill Clinton called the US “the indispensable nation”. For universities, it is.’
https://on.ft.com/4hX9jvq

🤢 “#Zuckerberg, in short, turns out to be a giant man-baby suffering from a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people overestimate their own cognitive abilities.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/13/careless-people-by-sarah-wynn-williams-review-zuckerberg-and-me

‘Of course, Trump is a vandal. But in tearing down the status quo he does no more than confirm the obvious — that the elite coalition that favoured US global leadership has lost its political grip. If Europe wants something it likes to call a “rules-based order”, it will have to make it for itself.’
https://on.ft.com/3Fc9TIb

Trump DoJ antitrust chief nominee Gail “Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google.”
https://on.ft.com/4hfVYOu

The UK Home Office (interior ministry) appears to have forgotten entirely about the "independent" Technical Advisory Board #TAB whose advice it legally must take when #Apple appeals its secret order ("Technical Capability Notice” leaked to the Washington Post) to compromise #iPhone/ #ADP security worldwide to enable future surveillance by the UK 🤡🤡
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366619028/Apple-British-techies-to-advise-on-devastating-UK-global-crypto-power-grab

‘Yakoob has paid “substantial” damages and costs for his publication of the video, removed the posts and agreed not to post them again. It is thought to be the first case of a political “#deepfake” — images or video edited or generated using #AI — being subject to a legal settlement in the UK.’
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/i-doorknocked-for-labour-then-racist-deepfake-ruined-my-life-fn6xxc5dc