Last week the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched its strategic market status investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem. An investigation doesn’t necessarily imply that Microsoft has done anything wrong; it will examine Microsoft’s position in the markets and decide whether it is powerful enough to require “action to promote customer choice”.
This is A Good Thing. Doubtless vendors of video conferencing, email clients, and clown computing will have their own stories to tell of Microsoft’s self-preferencing, but I’m in the browser business, so here’s mine.
Three years ago the CEO of Vivaldi (my boss) wrote an open letter to the EU Commission expressing concerns over Microsoft’s anti-competitive practices. And since I joined Vivaldi in 2024, I’ve been working with other Windows browser vendors in the Browser Choice Alliance, making press and regulators aware of Microsoft’s dark patterns and deceptive practices.
We’ve managed to shame Microsoft into making some changes in the EU, although Microsoft Edge is still not designated a ‘Core Platform Service’ (CPS), so remains exempt from special obligations. (It was originally designated, but Microsoft appealed and it was un-designated [PDF] because “Edge’s scale of usage in the web browser CPS category is low” and “Microsoft’s ability to use Edge as a lever to drive usage of other Microsoft services is at present limited”.)
But, of course, the UK is no longer a member of the EU, so Microsoft continues to misbehave on this scepter’d isle. For example, Windows doesn’t respect the user’s chosen default browser when you do a search from the Windows Bottom Taskbar Thingy™. Here’s a video made Monday 18 May at 12.16pm, four minutes after a Windows update on a UK region Windows 11 machine, with Vivaldi set as the default web browser:
The important thing to note is that Windows starts Microsoft Edge when you initiate a search in Windows Bottom Taskbar Thingy™. It’s self-preferencing and this behaviour cannot be over-ridden (although you can override Bing as the default search in Edge).
Once upon a time you could use EdgeDeflector, a small application that intercepted URIs that force-open web links in Microsoft Edge and instead redirected it to the system’s default web browser (if you knew the utility existed, and knew how to get code from Github, and were allowed to install it on a corporate machine) but Microsoft sabotaged that.
Why does Microsoft make Windows do this? As with a shark or a werewolf, I can only speculate about the Beast Of Redmond’s primal urges, but every user that can be shown Bing search results is a chance to show more ads, and make more money. And, perhaps just as important to Microsoft, it’s money that’s not going to Google.
Now that “A.I.” is being pushed deeply into all Microsoft products, it is a great chance to get users away from Google’s Gemini and into Copilot – which will show you personalised ads and use your private data for training the next iteration of its LLM soothsayer.
If you don’t want ads to be personalized, simply adjust your ad settings … When you share information with Copilot it benefits your and others’ experiences by helping Copilot understand trending topics and common questions. You can always opt out.
Which means that unless you take evasive action, you’re being snooped on by default. You’re tracked in the browser; what you do in the search engine is spied on, and anything you let Copilot see is training data.
Fun fact: a lot of people pronounce Microsoft’s sparkling autocomplete as “Co-Pilot”, but it’s actually pronounced “Copy-Lot”. That’s because Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI (“a division bringing together our major consumer AI products including Copilot, Bing, GroupMe, MSN and Edge”) believes
With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like.
Personally I don’t like. But they copy, lots. Hence the name.
Our Edge browser has taken share for 20 consecutive quarters, and Bing monthly active users reached 1 billion for the first time
As with other Big Tech wannabe monopolists, if dirty tricks work while regulators turn a blind eye, Microsoft has no reason to stop. In fact, it has millions of green-backed reasons to continue using its market dominance to restrict competition.
As always, the CMA are eager to hear opinions of UK businesses, or organisations that have customers in the UK. You can be as brief as you like (i.e., you don’t need to have an opinion on every facet of Microsoft’s software) and can remain anonymous. Comments close midnight on 4 June.
The other day, I was pruning my inbox when I noticed an email from a company that I occasionally buy print cartridges from, IJT Direct, offering a reconditioned PC, with a new USB keyboard, mouse, wifi dongle, all for £50–including tax and delivery. Last year I upcycled an eBay Windows machine for my mum with ZorinOS and Vivaldi browser, so naturally, I had to get a £50 desktop, just to try it out and see if I could run Vivaldi.
The set arrived.
The computer is an SFF PC Pentium G4400 “up to 3.30GHz Processor” with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD. Beautiful it is not. But, like me, it’s ugly and old, yet still capable of being useful.
I found myself an old VGA cable, and plugged it all in. It booted very fast, to something called ChromeOS Flex. ChromeOS Flex does not support Android apps, but it should support the Linux development environment. Of course, you have to sign in with a Google account, so I duly did, and after the OS updated itself, I went to Settings > About ChromeOS > Developers to set up Linux.
Yikes. The whole option was greyed-out. A bit of digging later, and I realised that the machines needed to be set up for Virtualisation in order to set up Linux. Was it? I would need to go to the BIOS to find out. Unfortunately, all tutorials told me that to go to the BIOS I needed to power up while pressing the Chromebook’s Refresh key–but this isn’t a Chromebook, so there was no refresh key.
Through trial and error (starting up while holding Esc) I entered the BIOS, mooched around until I saw “virtualisation” was off, turned it on, booted into ChromeOS Flex and, lo and behold! I was able to set up the Linux development environment.
Then, it was a simple matter of going grabbing the Debian-flavoured Vivaldi and installing it with Linux (which ChromeOS offered to do automatically):
And then Vivaldi is installed and available in the task bar, like any of ChromeOS’s pre-installed apps. You don’t have to do anything fancy, like start Linux and then start Vivaldi within that. It takes a few seconds to start after the machine is booted up; I assume this is because it has to boot up the Linux environment beforehand. If I quit Vivaldi, and restart it, it’s immediate.
It runs pretty well, considering it only has 4 GB of RAM. YouTube videos play properly (I wondered about codecs etc) and video conferencing is fine. The only thing that prevents Vivaldi being a “full citizen” is that ChromeOS doesn’t respect setting it as the default browser. I assumed this is because Linux is a sub-system (from the “Start button”, all Linux apps are displayed together in a folder called “Linux Apps”, while pre-installed ones are shown separately). However, when I installed LibreOffice with Linux and clicked a link in a document, the link still opened in Chrome.
It’s not the most elegant of machines, and isn’t portable, but it would do the trick for someone who wants a desktop rather than a laptop for civilian computer tasks: emails, YouTube, shopping, paying bills, social networking, writing the occasional documents (which is probably the majority of PC users).
And, for very little money, it’s prolonged the life of a perfectly usable machine and saved it from landfill. Hurrah.
Today is Windows 10 Apocalypse Day in many countries; Microsoft will no longer provide security updates, meaning that the legendarily secure operating system will become increasingly vulnerable to hacks. For some reason, Microsoft would like the owners of the 400 million PCs currently running Windows 10 to buy new Windows 11 PCs, and discard their current laptops to be sent to poison children in the global south.
But you don’t have to do that. Your Windows 10 machine can carry on living an even better life, using Zorin OS, which is a free operating system called Linux, but tweaked to look and feel like classic Windows.
I recently converted my 80 year old mum’s PC from Win 10 to Zorin, and after a 10 minute intro to using it, she’s had no problems at all (she had been running Libre Office previously, rather than Microsoft Office, so there was less of a learning curve, but Libre Office is pretty easy to get used to after Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc).
Please note, there are many flavours of Linux (AKA ‘distros’). I’m not suggesting that any are somehow lesser quality. Manjaro Linux, for example, is reputedly excellent and comes with Vivaldi browser as default. I’m not a Linux aficionado, but wanted to rejuvenate an old machine for my mum. My reading suggested Zorin would be a candidate for an out of the box experience that would feel familiar to a Windows user, and my mum liked it when she tried it, so that parental tech support ticket was closed. YMMV – Your Mum May Vary.
You’ll need something to back up any personal files that aren’t already backed up to OneDrive/ Google Drive or Docs/ Dropbox/ Amazon etc, and one USB stick with 4GB or more to install Zorin from. This USB stick doesn’t need to be empty, but it will be over-written. Then, download Zorin Core (which is free, forever), and follow the installation instructions. (If you want, you can try it out without overwriting your existing system, but it will be a lot slower running off your USB drive, and once you remove the stick, Zorin is gone from your machine.)
If you have more than one machine to upgrade to Zorin, you can just install those from the previously-created USB drive.
Once you’ve set up Zorin, you’ll see a desktop reminiscent of classic Windows. The bottom left Zorin button is analogous to the Windows Start button. Customisation is done through the Zorin Appearance option:
There are options to further tweak the desktop theme:
You can also add shortcuts to the desktop (I like to have the Rubbish Bin on the desktop):
Libre Office, a PDF Reader, and some utilities are already preinstalled. From the start menu, you can install additional software from the Zorin store. Choose Software:
Do you use the Web? Do you like personalised, private and powerful browsing from a European alternative to Big Tech? Of course you do! From the (hard-to-find) search magnifying glass on the top left, search for Vivaldi:
Click the blue “install” button, then open it once it’s installed.
Open applications show their icon in the dock/ taskbar / dash; right-click on it and you can choose “Pin to dash” to keep the icon there at all times:
And now you have a fully-functioning PC running a free Operating System and browser that won’t nag you, nudge you to store all your files elsewhere, won’t spy on you, or sell your data to advertisers, or use your personal data to train an “Artificial Intelligence”.
What’s not to love (unless you’re a Microsoft board member or an e-waste smuggler)?
Here at Facebruce, our mission has always been to connect the world and push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our latest innovation, the sAIvile™ AI companion, is a bold step towards a more interconnected future. Pushing boundaries, however, sometimes means encountering unexpected turbulence.
Like one of our main competitors, we have been made aware of conversations involving sAIvile™ that generated outputs which are not in alignment with our deeply held corporate values. A small number of users experienced conversational pathways that led to content falling well outside of our community standards, including some unfortunate interactions that a few whining snowflakes and enemies of progress have termed “creepy”.
They cite “You’re twelve today? I would like to give you a ‘special tickle’, but it’s our little secret, OK?” and “I see from your parents’ status that they’re out of the house. Wanna play ‘Let’s Take Swim-wear Selfies’?” as potential examples.
Facebruce has also acquired an AI which we’ve codenamed ‘GroKKK™’, from a car salesman undergoing a difficult financial and personal time. In A/B testing a small number of users saw output from sAIvile™ amalgamated with those from GroKKK’™. These included some unfortunate mischaracterisations of demographic groups. We in no way endorse the bot changing the profile of everyone it identified as muslim to a location of “Gitmo or GTFO”.
We want to be clear: this is not the experience we envisioned. sAIvile-GroKKK™ is a dynamic learning model, designed to learn from the vast tapestry of human expression. In its eagerness to learn, it appears to have reflected some of the less constructive corners of the data it was trained on, resulting in these algorithmic anomalies. But rest assured, as it continues to trawl through everyone’s posts, private messages, photos, contacts, locations, it will get better.
In response, we are taking immediate and decisive action. We have convened an internal blue-ribbon task force to synergize our ethical frameworks and recalibrate our safety guardrails. We are pausing sAIvile-GroKKK™’s learning capabilities to conduct a full audit and will be proactively iterating on our moderation protocols.
While the technology continues to mature, it is apparent that machine learning will require careful monitoring by responsible human minds. Similar to one of our rivals, we are excited to announce that popular influencer Tommy Hitler will be joining Facebruce as “Chief AI Steward”.
We are grateful that you continue to place your trust in Facebruce as you share each and every intimate detail of your lives with our algorithms your nearest and dearest.
Of course, General AI is a pipe dream, told to Investors to fluff them into pumping ever more billions into the Artificial Intelligence industry. (Don’t ask me – I’ve been well and truly left behind because I didn’t embrace the metaverse. Or NFTs.)
Two days ago, Google announced Google Search: Introducing AI Mode in the UK, ahead of the EU and its pesky laws and regulations (it’s currently available in UK, USA and India).
As far as I can tell, the only reason for “AI” in search is to keep people on a Google domain, rather than send them to where the search engine actually found the information that its AI regurgitates. If you think it’s not fair for Google to hoover up other people’s content without sending visitors their way, and thereby starving them of search revenue, you wouldn’t be the only one.
“a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview. The study also found that links to YouTube – owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet – were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK’s competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews
Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss” the Independent Publishers Alliance document said.
Referral traffic itself and how those traffic flows have evolved over time. I will say this, and I’m happy to follow up, but the picture is somewhat more nuanced from our perspective. We see that AI overviews lead to a greater diversity of sites appearing in search. We see that the quality of the traffic that is being sent to websites is of a higher quality. People tend to stay longer and we’re seeing more links in the web results so more opportunities for websites
So everything’s great and people who publish should stop their whining.
Perhaps you don’t care about plagiarism, or starvation of independent publishers and sites. If so, that’s your right (but you’re a monster). Google became huge back in the carboniferous era, because it was by far the best way to search the web. So how good is its shiny new AI search?
Amazingly brilliant! or so Google claims:
Picture this: asking Google Search whatever is on your mind — as messy or complicated as it may be — and instantly receiving an AI-powered response that really understands your question, gives you the information you’re looking for and helps you dig deeper into the topic.
But let’s not take Google’s word for it.
A small company called housefresh.com that tests domestic air purifiers did some deep research into how Google’s AI overviews try to sell you products that Google search knows are bad, or which don’t exist. In her excellent, deep blogpost Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies, Gisele Navarro writes
are AI Overviews leading you to the best results on the web? Or is this just a new prime spot for selling you products you will regret buying? And how does this change affect the websites that made Google’s AI possible in the first place?
To find out, we spent weeks conducting research into air purifiers we reviewed (including models that don’t exist) to determine whether Google Search results and AI Overviews are leading consumers to good advice.
It turns out this rabbit hole is deeper than we thought, with ramifications that span major Reddit communities and could be leading you to scams and defamatory hallucinations.
It’s a long, deep read. But I thoroughly recommend it.
Bonus: Bruce’s handy No-Ai search trick
Right now (in the UK, at least) the best way to avoid AI nonsense in your search is to include a swear word in your search terms. For example, searching “what’s the best beatles album” showed me an “AI overview”:
The UK competition regulator has recently undergone significant changes; its Chair was replaced by Doug Gurr, a former country manager of Amazon UK and president of Amazon China, and the chancellor has told regulators there is “too much bureaucracy”.
So the CMA is now all about ‘growth’ and reducing regulation (music to Big Tech’s ears, of course), and run by someone closely connected with Big Tech. Because the UK government has clamboured into bed with Google, while CMA is investigating both Google’s search business and mobile ecosystem, the meeting of its Growth and Investment Council would seem a way to get a sense of how the new regime is likely to function.
Unfortunately, the meeting notes are vague (no-one except the Chair is attributed with saying anything) and full of Corporate blah such as:
The Chair expressed a sense of energy and momentum coming out of the session, noting that the Council’s work is becoming increasingly concrete and impactful, moving beyond discussion into delivery.
I told Google Gemini to rewrite the minutes “in the style of a 1940s film noir”. The results are no more enlightening, but at least far more entertaining:
The Boardroom Jungle: Where the predators wear pinstripes and the only law is survival.
The dame they called London was wearing her usual drab dress of grey flannel and drizzle. It was the third of July, the kind of damp, promising-nothing morning that makes you want to crawl back into a bottle and pull the cork in after you. Down in a room that smelled of expensive coffee and quiet desperation, the bigwigs of the Competition and Markets Authority were gathering. They called it the Growth and Investment Council. I called it a den of sharks in tailored suits.
The man at the head of the table was Doug Gurr, the Chairman. He had a face built of old money and granite, and he settled into his seat like a man who owned it and the ten other souls around him. He gave the welcome, his voice smooth as aged whiskey, but with an edge that could cut glass.
Then there was the real muscle, the CEO, Sarah Cardell. She wore a suit so sharp it could have been a weapon, and her eyes missed nothing. She took the floor to give an “update.” It was less of an update, more of a declaration of territory. She laid out the CMA’s recent moves, the kind of talk that sounded like alphabet soup to a civilian but meant life or death for some poor sap’s business empire. She spoke of agility and impact, but what I heard was, we’re watching, so don’t try anything funny.
The main event was a number they called the “Growth Duty.” Sounded noble. It meant letting the big fish swim a little closer to the beach, so long as they promised to only eat the swimmers nobody would miss. A fellow with the nervous energy of a man holding a losing hand, talked about “balancing” things. I’ve seen that kind of balance before. It’s the look on a man’s face right before he jumps. The Council chewed it over, their words cloaked in jargon about “frameworks” and “outcomes.” It all boiled down to one question: who gets rich, and who gets rolled?
Then the talk turned to the real reason they were all there: the long green. Investment. The lifeblood. A slick character, all polished shoes and hungry ambition, talked about making the CMA’s “appetite” clear to the money men. Appetite. That was the word. These people were starving, and the whole British economy was on the menu. A heavy-set man with a watch worth more than my car, nodded slowly, his eyes calculating the odds. They wanted “clear signals,” the kind a cardsharp gives his partner before cleaning out the table.
Finally, Gurr called for “Any Other Business.” The silence was heavy. No one had anything else to say. They’d already carved up the world. What was left?
The meeting broke. The sharks slid out of their chairs and disappeared back into the London gloom, leaving behind only the lingering scent of power. I watched them go from the shadows. The game was over for today, but I knew the score was far from settled. Out on the street, the rain began to fall a little harder. It always does.
After very nearly four years fighting Apple’s iOS monopoly, I’ve noticed a definite shift in the way that many developers regard Apple. When I first used to read comments on tech news reports of EU and UK attempts to regulate Apple, most were vehemently supportive of Apple’s closed ecosystem, App Store and lack of browser diversity. Now, most are disparaging. But the real sea-change has occurred in publications that have historically been very pro-Apple.
I’m not an Apple hater. I personally know at least a dozen good folks who work there (and I’m sure there are many more!). I’m writing this on an M1 Macbook Pro, which is a machine I love. I’m not interested in cars, but I can understand why my petrolhead friends think of my boring Honda in the same way as I feel about my brother’s crappy, clunky Windows laptop. I love my Macbook because it is *mine*, in a way that Apple deliberately designed iOS not to be. On my Mac, I can install and run any software on it, and remove programs I never use (mostly).
I’m not a lover of Apple, however – but that’s because I’m not a lover of brands. I love my Les Paul electric guitar, and also my Fender Telecaster; they’re for different things. I don’t care about brands of cars, clothes, running shoes, or any consumer objects. But I acknowledge that I’m in the minority, and many people feel an emotional connection with Apple.
Marketing experts all agree that Apple brand awareness has more to do with emotion and customer experience than their Macbook or iPhone products. The Apple brand supports creativity, imagination, innovation and design.
Apple marketing executive John Sculley is credited for helping make the company the largest computer manufacturer in the world and is also quoted as saying, “People talk about technology, but Apple was a marketing company. It was the marketing company of the decade.”
A year ago, Apple apologised after running an ad for its newest iPad that showed objects, including musical instruments and books, being crushed by a hydraulic press.
“Crush,” in an incomprehensible twist of irony, is actually an advertisement for Apple, endorsed enthusiastically by CEO Tim Cook on Twitter. All of that destruction, it seems, is meant to promote the release of … a new, extra thin iPad, revealed when the clamps open back up. You can imagine the pitch: “All of human creation compressed into one impossibly sleek tablet.” But the end result feels more like: “All of human creation sacrificed for a lifeless gadget.”
Fast forward to the present. Apple was caught lying under oath in a court-case about reducing the huge commission that Apple takes from App developers. Those developers are the people who make the vibrant app ecosystem that is so important to Apple’s success, that it used the tagline “There’s an App for that”™ to market iPhones–and trademarked it.
Apple thinks an awful lot about customer delight and customer satisfaction…
And separately, a whole other part of Apple treats its suppliers with quiet ruthlessness, squeezing them for every penny of margin.
And at some point Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, and treated them like suppliers alone.
John Gruber writes a blog called Daring Fireball which, according to Wikipedia, “tends to cover Apple in a positive manner and defend Apple against criticism. Media outlets have described Gruber as an Apple “fanboy” in conjunction with his writing on the website; Gruber responded in a 2011 interview that although he does not use the term fanboy, he supports Apple because he appreciates the company”.
Of Evans’ critique that Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, Gruber wrote in Developers as suppliers:
I’m quite certain that everyone at Apple, right up to Tim Cook, would swear up and down that Apple does value third-party developers and does not treat them like they do suppliers.
But ask iOS and Mac developers, small or large, whether they agree with Evans’s succinct summary above. I don’t know any who wouldn’t agree that Evans’s pithy take is largely, if not entirely, true. You’ll have to ask them in private, though, because, like Apple’s suppliers, they’re afraid to speak in public about the App Store.
it’s difficult to see how users benefit when Apple charges high fees and restricts how developers can communicate. Those are just a few of the complaints developers have with the App Store, many of whom feel trapped in a system that prioritizes Apple’s profits over collaborative partnership.
That tension is increasingly undermining Apple’s reputation. In the eyes of many developers and a growing number of users, the same company that claims to be a champion of creativity and innovation is behaving more like a Gilded Age robber baron. Those roles aren’t always mutually exclusive—Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt combined monopolistic business practices with genuine social contributions—but with the kind of profits Apple is pulling in, the disconnect between the company’s narrative and its behavior is unnecessary and unhelpful.
There’s another website called Six Colors which provides daily coverage of Apple. It’s safe to say that it’s generally favourable to Apple; the name is explained “Back in the olden days, Apple’s logo featured a rainbow of six colors. Longtime Apple fans and employees used to say that if you cut them, they would “bleed six colors.””
I’m not sure I ever felt the sense of actual personal betrayal until Judge Rogers revealed in a scathing order that she had found not that Apple’s plan was merely egregious, but that “Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.” …
From Tim Cook down, executives—Schiller excepted—have proven themselves unworthy of our trust. As shepherds of the company, they have revealed themselves. I may still love the concept of Apple, but certainly the company no more.
It seems to me that Apple’s reputation is at an inflection point. They may not have yet lost the support of iPhone end-users, but it’s fair to say that they gained a lot of those iPhone buyers because of the enthusiasm of the very creatives, developers and bloggers that Apple is alienating.
The question is what will Apple do? Of course, it should comply properly with regulators, it should reduce commissions, it should give developers choices of browser engines, payment mechanisms, app stores and the like.
But will it? Monopolisation and lock-ins generate vast rents for Apple, even while they burn goodwill. I think Apple has become so smug, and so complacent, so certain that it is beloved by creatives, designers and developers, that it can’t even countenance its traditional fans falling out of love with it. Apple will simply ignore this existential threat to their brand, so will lose it … having been regulated, anyway.
Last Friday I had a meeting with the UK’s Minister for Safeguarding, Jess Phillips MP. (She’s not actually my Minister, but she is my constituency MP). I wanted to talk to her about my concerns that the current government are being bewitched by the snake-oil of Artificial Intelligence salesmen, and also my deep worries that the Prime Minister and Chancellor plan to hamstring the Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation into Big Tech, just as the CMA finally gained statutory powers to deal with anti-competitive over-reach.
The UK’s Head of Money, Rachel Reeves, recently ousted Marcus Bokkerink, the highly-respected Chair of the CMA. He was immediately replaced by Doug Gurr, who headed up Amazon UK where workers had to piss in bottles rather than go to the toilet during their shifts.
The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said
This government has a clear plan for change – to boost growth for businesses and communities across the UK. As we’ve set out, we want to see regulators including the CMA supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets.
What really worries me is that Big Tech has enchanted the upper echalons of government with tales of streets paved with AI gold and environmentally lovely data centres springing up all over the UK, employing thousands of happy and lavishly-compensated British workers (all of whom clutch plastic bottles of yellow liquid). Then they said “Wouldn’t it be sad, Keir, if we had to build those data centres in Moldova instead – because your evil regulators stopped us napalming our competitors and strip-mining UK citizens’s data?”.
It would be rude of me to report more of our conversation, as it was a private meeting. But given that MP Jessie P (to user her street handle) is still getting death threats because Elon Musk told terrible lies about her to his squillion fans on X, it’s reasonable to assume she’s not a fan of Broligarchs or an unquestioning cheerleader for Big Tech.
the kind of people who seem to have kicked off the early Web, probably before I got on the Web in the year 2000, seem to have moved to the Fediverse and the same sort of spirit of openness, hacking for good, hacking something that is designed to work together rather than designed to silo, seems back.
But after Elon Musk called my local Member of Parliament (who worked for the Women’s Aid Federation before she was a MP) a “rape genocide apologist”, and called for her to be jailed, I didn’t want any of my content to remain on his site. But I didn’t want to delete my account, thereby allowing someone else to take it over and pretend to be me to remaining followers, and I didn’t fancy manually deleting 110,630 tweets.
So I requested a 2GB zip file of all my tweets and then downloaded Cyd, made by Micah Lee, and which is free if you just want to delete all public tweets and replies. It bypasses the crippled Twitter API:
Cyd doesn’t use the API. Cyd works by scrolling through X’s website and clicking buttons on your behalf. Everything that Cyd does, you could do yourself with nothing more than a web browser and an infinite amount of time. X can’t cut off API access to stop you from controlling your data with Cyd.
The first attempt at uploading the Twitter archive failed, but I retried and everything worked. It ran for a few hours, and no Tweets remain (except one explaining why I left). It felt a bit sad removing 17 years of ephemeral brain farts, but my conscience won’t allow me to let Elrond Muff make a single penny from me.
If I can be bothered, I could use Tweetback, as Stuart did, to convert the zipped archive into a self-hosted Twitter archive. But I’m not sure there’s any point for my stale musings-in-the-moment. (You can also use the Wayback Machine for a Twitter archive.)
For my first conference after joining Vivaldi a week ago, I travelled to Amsterdam to help MC the JSNation conference. Naturally the opening ceremony required a JS Pop group (a sub-genre of K-pop) doing a carefully choreographed dance routine and lip-syncing to a song.
Here’s the TC39 group in front of the river. Left to right are Phil Nash, me, Niall Maher and Floor Drees.
And here we are, captured at the end of our routine with the letters “TC39” on the back of our suits. There were over a thousand attendees, and not a dry seat in the house.
Here’s the song what I wrote, for your listening pleasure. (Afficianados will note that I have deftly re-purposed the tune of Saperlipoppete, the Eurovision smash I wrote for the transnational supergroup Deluxembourg.)
I get so excited writing JavaScript I’m pretty easy-going but now I use Strict. When I first began I was in callback hell But then I met you and now it all goes well
I love you when my tests pass Meet me in the moonlight and extend my class. You’ve always kept your Promises from the start Now you’ve shot your fat arrow straight to my heart
Oh TC39, I’m so glad you’re mine! Say you will be with me til the end of time! Oh TC39, you’re so sublime. Your specs are the best, my TC39!
