Riley Testut:

I’m thrilled to announce a brand new version of AltStore — AltStore PAL — is launching TODAY as an Apple-approved alternative app marketplace in the EU. AltStore PAL is an open-source app store made specifically for independent developers, designed to address the problems I and so many others have had with the App Store over the years. Basically, if you’ve ever experienced issues with App Review, this is for you!

We’re launching with 2 apps initially: my all-in-one Nintendo emulator Delta — a.k.a. the reason I built AltStore in the first place — and my clipboard manager Clip, a real clipboard manager that can actually run in the background. Delta will be FREE (with no ads!), whereas Clip will require a small donation of €1 or more. Once we’re sure everything is running smoothly we’ll then open the doors to third-party apps — so if you’d like to distribute your app with AltStore, please get in touch.

Exciting times for iOS users in the EU. Both of these things can be true:

• The DMA is a bad law that, I believe, will result in more harm than good for most users.
• For iOS power users and enthusiasts, alternative app marketplaces are going to be fun and useful. Right now there’s no better place to be an iPhone user than the EU.

(Also: How fun is the name AltStore PAL?)

Dan Moren, writing last week at Six Colors:

Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.

Regulation works.

Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations — or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation.

I’d change “regulation works” to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. But there’s no question we’re seeing results. Moren cites three recent examples:

• New rules announced by Apple in January for game streaming services.
• New rules this month eliminating the ban on game emulators in the App Store.
• Changes last week in the Self Service Repair program regarding used components.¹

These changes are all wins. But they’re also all low-hanging fruit. Apple has no major self-interested reasons to fight against any of them, and regulatory scrutiny forced the company to stop ignoring them. It’s similar to how the Japan Fair Trade Commission’s investigation led to Apple loosening its anti-steering rules for “reader” apps worldwide in 2021. That might not have happened at all without the regulatory scrutiny, and certainly wouldn’t have otherwise happened when it did. But it was the lowest of low-hanging fruit: Apple, to my eyes, lost nothing by loosening those anti-steering provisions.

The real regulatory rubber hits the road on the issues that are against Apple’s own interests, or detrimental to the experience of users (which issues are, effectively, against Apple’s interests — Apple is in the business of making its users happy).

Eric Seufert, on Threads:

The EDPB — the EU’s legislature of privacy authorities — adopted a draft opinion today determining that large online platforms can’t offer a “pay or okay” model as a strict binary and must also offer a third, free choice that doesn’t utilize personalized advertising.

Given which way the wind’s been blowing in the EU, this is not surprising, but make no mistake, this is a radical stance. From the EDPB’s draft ruling (PDF):

The offering of (only) a paid alternative to the service which includes processing for behavioural advertising purposes should not be the default way forward for controllers. When developing the alternative to the version of the service with behavioural advertising, large online platforms should consider providing data subjects with an ‘equivalent alternative’ that does not entail the payment of a fee. If controllers choose to charge a fee for access to the ‘equivalent alternative’, controllers should consider also offering a further alternative, free of charge, without behavioural advertising, e.g. with a form of advertising involving the processing of less (or no) personal data. This is a particularly important factor in the assessment of certain criteria for valid consent under the GDPR. In most cases, whether a further alternative without behavioural advertising is offered by the controller, free of charge, will have a substantial impact on the assessment of the validity of consent, in particular with regard to the detriment aspect.

With respect to the requirements of the GDPR for valid consent, first of all, consent needs to be ‘freely given’. In order to avoid detriment that would exclude freely given consent, any fee imposed cannot be such as to effectively inhibit data subjects from making a free choice. Furthemore, detriment may arise where non-consenting data subjects do not pay a fee and thus face exclusion from the service, especially in cases where the service has a prominent role, or is decisive for participation in social life or access to professional networks, even more so in the presence of lock-in or network effects. As a result, detriment is likely to occur when large online platforms use a ‘consent or pay’ model to obtain consent for the processing.

Seufert again:

In its opinion on Meta’s use of the Pay or Okay model, the EDPB effectively says that any sufficiently valuable product must offer a free version that doesn’t monetize via behavioral ads. That the quality of being indispensable means consumers must have unfettered access to it.

What makes this all the more outrageous is that many major publishers in the EU use this exact same “pay or OK” model to achieve GDPR compliance — and none offer a free alternative with non-targeted ads. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Der Spiegel to offer free access without ads. Christ, they don’t even let you look at their homepage without paying or consenting to targeted ads. And Spotify quite literally brags about its ad targeting. But Spotify is an EU company, so of course it wasn’t designated as a “gatekeeper” by the protection racketeers running the European Commission.

They’re not saying “pay or OK” is illegal. They’re saying it’s illegal only if you’re a big company from outside the EU with a very popular platform.

Meta’s only options for compliance with this ruling, as I see it:

• Offer a new free tier with contextual, rather than targeted, ads. To achieve an ARPU equivalent to Meta’s paid and free-with-targeted-ads tiers, this new offering would likely have to inundate users with a veritable avalanche of annoying ads. This, I would wager, would be deemed “malicious compliance” and thus also illegal.

• Offer a new free tier with contextual, rather than targeted, ads — but only show roughly the same frequency of ads as their lucrative free-with-targeted-ads tier. This is what the EDPB (and EC) are demanding, and seemingly think they can force Meta to do. Meta would almost certainly see ARPU plummet for all users who opt into this tier. Who knows if the revenue would even be sufficient to break even per such user?

• Invent some novel way to generate as much revenue per non-targeted ad as targeted ones. This is the “nerd harder” fantasy solution, a la demanding that secure end-to-end encryption provide back doors available only to “the good guys”.

• Cease offering Facebook and Instagram in the EU. (WhatsApp doesn’t monetize through targeted ads, so isn’t germane to this ruling.) This is the option the EDPB and EC believe “unthinkable” for Meta to take, because the EU is, in their minds, an indispensable market.

I don’t see how Meta can risk the second choice. Meta could afford to see ARPU plummet solely within the EU, and at first thought, you might think some revenue per EU user is surely better than no revenue at all from the EU. But if Meta caves and complies with this ruling by offering a free tier with significantly lower ARPU, that opens the door for regulators and legislative bodies around the globe to demand the same. Then, poof goes Meta as an industry colossus.

I suspect the EU regulatory bodies have some surprises coming regarding how this is going to play out.

According to Zack Snyder, Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead in response to her experience on a project titled “The Skyscraper.” But how did this project impact Rand’s life and career?

The post Ayn Rand and ‘The Skyscraper’ appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

A member asked a few days ago whether anyone really held the event-to-event view of causality. Two unfortunate examples of it appeared the same day (4/4/24) on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

“Ideology, ‘Information’ and the New Censorship” counter-attacked recent attacks on free speech. The author deals with a supreme court Justice’s hypothetical question about what could be said on social media:

Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. . . . Kids all over the country start doing this. There is an epidemic. Children are seriously injuring or even killing themselves in situations. Is it your view that government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage [!] social media platforms to take the information that is instigating this problem?

The op-ed writer’s response? He says there’s no information involved here, it’s opinion.

What’s cool to confused kids is a matter of interpretation and judgment, which are far beyond mere information.

Look at what both sides are evading: What kind of entity is government? What kind of action of that kind of entity is encouragement? What is the function of government? What are the limits of government action? What kind of entity is a teenager? Since the answer involves it having parents, what is it to be a parent? What are the responsibilities of a parent? What kinds of entities are on social media? What might they do, given their natures? What should they do? Why can only government act here?

If you put these and other issues about the natures of the entities involved, you come up with an entirely different answer: teenagers who allow themselves to be influenced by others, even to the point of doing self-destructive acts, can be influenced by others not to do. Parents are responsible for their children. Government may not use physical force to interfere with private activities, unless they involve force.

There is the issue of government protection of minors, but that is not an essential here.

The second article had the encouraging title “Climate Alarmism is Bad Science.”

But it was about a single climate nonsense article, asserting a patently event-to-event claim:

The authors claim that there is an optimal average temperature of 55.5 degrees Fahrenheit for economic growth.

And they “prove” it by that event-to-event staple: statistical correlation!

Worse: the debunking of it by the author of the WSJ op-ed consisted of showing that the statistics were fudged!

What would an entity-based view be? It asks questions about the nature of things: What is wealth? What is growth? (An increase in wealth; whose wealth?) Is it per capita, as the alarmists assume, or can we use some other measure? Who are the entities who create wealth? (Human beings.) If the cause of wealth is production (“the application of reason to the problem of survival,” in Ayn Rand’s definition), what conditions make it possible? (Individual freedom, including property rights.)

Instead of all this analysis of the nature of the entities involved, all that’s looked at—and all that the conservative can think of to criticize—is relationships, relationships between events. Here now higher GDP numbers and here now cooler temperatures.

You might as well have related the economic growth (government collected) statistics to the average number of termites in each country.

“What is it?” is the question that precedes and informs “How do its statistics compare to these other statistics?”

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I don't recommend you tune into cage-fighting TV. Not unless you just skip straight to the post-fight interviews — though I doubt they're all as admirable as this one ...

"If you care about your fucking country," said rising Brazilion champion Renato Moicano, "read Ludwig Von Mises and 'The Six Lessons' of the Austrian economics school, motherfuckers."

He's right you know. You should. Motherfuckers. 

But a strange thing to have in your head, right, after several minutes of beating in someone else's. He explained later that "as his platform continues to enlarge, [he] wants to use his spotlight to help change the world, particularly the United States."

“A lot of people talk to me about money. But, the problem is, it’s not about how much money you get, it’s about how much money you can keep. With the inflation how it is…and this book, he explained what the government does with your money ,with taxes, and the way they [finance] debt… 

“[I]n Brazil, people are going crazy with [my interview], a lot of people have gotten interested in it and how people are getting taxed with inflation. My message is so important…it’s crystal clear. If you don’t control the debt, that’s going to ruin this country. We need a free market of ideas.”

He's right. We do. 

[Click here for the free e-book or PDF; and on the Ludwig Von Mises tag below to see what I've written over the years about the great man.]