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Update your devices as soon as Apple releases such updates. … On iPhones and iPads, my hope is that updates are automatic.

Is your advice to patch Apple devices immediately rather than to wait for them to appear as ‘Install’ on the Master Patch List?

I can’t praise this article enough. While I am a big believer that machine learning based AI already has and will have huge power in the fields to which it is suited, the LLM hype as some universal mind that will surpass humans any day now (which has been promised for decades) seems fundamentally overblown to me, and this is probably the best summary of why this is the case that I have read. It laid out my thoughts on the matter more clearly than I ever could. A really important article and really well done.

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Michael Covington, Alan Hoffberg

Please don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t for one moment implying that you were trying to deceive anyone, I just disagree with the premise of the headline and the premise that Microsoft wouldn’t train Copilot on its users’ data, that’s all.

I think the main point of disagreement comes down to whether one believes that Microsoft would be willing to risk a lawsuit to push ahead with training on its users’ data, and I very much think they would, as the modus operandi of technology companies over the past decade or two seems very much to push the legal limits (to put it kindly), knowing that they will get nothing more than a small (for them) monetary fine if they get caught.

As for the PR standpoint, Microsoft has shown time and time again in recent years that it is willing to endure poor PR to push its competitive advantage and profits, presumably because it knows that it has mostly a monopoly in many spaces and thus poor PR is going to lose it few customers. I can’t see a reason to believe that this has changed.

I know that you weren’t claiming anything by mentioning them, but because of these two things and because of the potential profits at stake, when I see that Microsoft has specifically omitted certain things from a statement, I can’t help but be suspicious of them.

But anyway, regardless of the disagreement, I enjoyed the article, as I always do, and found it very informative. Thank you for your work. I hope that you, rather than I, are right on this matter!

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Cybertooth, Peter Deegan

The headline of the article is “No, Microsoft isn’t stealing your data to feed Copilot”, but as is mentioned in the article, Microsoft goes out of its way to not mention perpetual-licence Office documents, web Office documents and 365 Basic Office documents, as well as all cloud data, as being excluded from being used to train Copilot, so I don’t see how the claim in the headline can be made.

I would honestly be shocked if Microsoft wasn’t training Copilot on these things, and more things besides – that’s the only logical reason that Microsoft would have to specify other things but not them. After all, if Microsoft wasn’t training Copilot on any of its users’ data then it would simply say “we do not train Copilot on your data”, not give a very specific list of things that it doesn’t train Copilot on.

At the end of the day, Microsoft simply has too much to gain by training Copilot on its users’ data. Sure, it will exclude corporate clients from this, because for now it needs to keep them on side, but the advantage in the AI race is in large part based on who has access to the most and best training data, and Microsoft isn’t going to freely give up such an advantage just for PR.

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Mr. Austin, Cybertooth

peterb wrote:

Is there any potential issue with the type of hardware – Intel vs. Apple silicon – affecting software’s ability to run? y

Something to be aware of is that Apple dropped support for Intel 32-bit software a few years back. Realistically this is only going to impact you if you want to play older games, as almost all modern software is at the very least Intel 64-bit and very often Apple Silicon native, but I thought I’d mention it in case it applies to you.

Putting the idea of The National Emergency Library aside, which was a likely well intentioned but poorly thought out idea that only lasted for a couple of months, the bigger issue is the shutting down of The Internet Archive entire Controlled Digital Lending program, so I suppose it fundamentally comes down to whether people think that libraries, which have been around for millennia, should now fall under the control of publishers.

For background as I understand it, The Internet Archive is a registered library and, before it was prevented from doing so, lent out scanned versions of books corresponding one-to-one to books that it physically owns. As far as I’m aware, it operated like any other library, the only difference being that it lent digitalised versions rather than physical versions. The digital versions were encrypted and were unusable once the lending period was complete, and as mentioned were lent on a one-to-one basis with books they physically owned, so I don’t see how this is vastly different from a traditional physical library.

As far as I’m aware, the legal argument is that lending a book digitally is different from lending a book physically because the book is copied to the user’s computer when borrowing it. This seems very antiquated and oblivious to modern technology to me, though, since how else are you going to lend someone a digital book?

Of course, publishers absolutely hate libraries since they’d much rather people weren’t able to share books with each other, but personally I don’t think that we should have to abandon the libraries that humanity has had for millennia just because we’re moving to an age of digital reading.

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wavy, bowled845, SueW, Myst, Paul, TechTango, Cybertooth

Since you’ve referred to it as the “search box”, I assume that you are using separate address and search boxes?
If that is the case, once everything between the address box and the search box has been removed (as btbs described), you can exit the customisation tab, and then on any normal tab you will find that you can resize the address and search boxes together by clicking and dragging at the point between them.

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CAS

I haven’t encountered this issue on my iPhone, but it happened to my father (who has an identical iPhone) after updating his phone to iOS 17.7.1. I force quit the Notes app and when I opened it again the notes all synced.

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pmcjr6142

So if a regular person copies content and profits from it it’s stealing/plagiarism and is naturally illegal, but, if a big tech company copies the same content and profits from it, someone somewhere waves a magic wand and the content magically transforms into “information” and it becomes perfectly legal? My eyebrow is very raised.

If it’s about harm being done then it’s incredibly obvious that harm is being done to the publishers by using their content to train AI, because this means that more people are going to use AI for “information” instead of reading the newspaper articles that “information” is harvested from.

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windbg

I agree that this is huge. Qualcomm controls 30% of the smartphone chip market, and unless this is resolved they won’t be able to manufacture those chips any more.

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Alex5723

App permissions are under System Settings -> Privacy & Security, where you can check app permissions on a per permission basis. Nothing will be enabled if you haven’t previously allowed it by accepting a popup, though.

I can’t test it because I don’t use it, but according to Will Fastie in the latest newsletter, the old Ctrl + Alt + V works for Outlook still.

They paid $3 million to use Start Me Up, I believe. Not at all bad for 30 years ago.

The Windows 95 startup sound, though, is still unbeaten as far as I am concerned. Maybe it is nostalgia, but it really evokes something for me.

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ClearThunder

I remember you helpfully posting this a couple of years ago, Alex. So, given that AV-Test detected 12,445 new pieces of MacOS malware in 2022, I’m a bit skeptical (to say the least) of Macworld’s claim that their list, which includes 10 pieces of MacOS malware for 2022, is complete!

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/technology/microsoft-earnings-profit.html

For context, Microsoft’s revenue is up 18% and its profits are up 33%.