I managed not to do any writing at all this week, as I’m off work over the coming days and so didn’t have a lot of time. But I can’t miss out on my link blog because if I did, the backlog of fun things to write about next week would end up so big I would have to make it 20 blue links. And who wants that? So here we are.

1. Microsoft takes security seriously (again)

Anyone old enough to remember Windows in the 90s knows what an awful, insecure mess it was. In 2002, Bill Gates sent out a memo on “trustworthy computing” and, within a couple of years, Windows security had improved massively. Now, Satya Nadella is doing the same thing – but his memo isn’t quite as good. It’s overdue: Windows has, once again, become a buggy mess and where there are bugs there are security holes. Why now? Mainly because putting AI into Windows will be the foundation of keeping people on the platform, so an insecure Windows is, once again, a bad thing for Microsoft.

2. Why I don’t trust Google with my files, redux

It’s not just that I don’t trust Google not to scrape the content I create to build some mega profile of me and target ads. Heck, thanks to NextDNS and uBlock Origin, I don’t really often see ads unless I want to. It’s that I know creating content where you don’t have a local backup is a bad idea. And this is why. Yes, you can use Google Takeout to export your Google Docs into formats that other apps can read, but for all that is holy, please don’t use their web apps to write the only version of your novel. If you really want to use a browser to write, sign up for a free Nextcloud account and use Collabora Office, which saves files as OpenDocument by default.

3. Hell freezes over

I have always had a lot of time for Paul Thurrott. He’s been writing about Microsoft for almost three decades and has always been an unapologetic fan of Windows. But he’s also a strong critic of some of Microsoft’s business practices, and he’s not afraid to talk about the enshittification of Windows 11. And now he’s reviewed a 15in MacBook Air and loves it. Everything that Paul says tallies with my experience on the 13in Air. It’s an absolutely joyous machine to use, although the base model doesn’t have enough storage (forget the complaints about 8Gb memory, for the usage that you’re going to put this machine to, it’s fine).

4. And they wonder why people are “quiet quitting”

As I occasionally say to young journalists, you owe the company that you work for precisely nothing apart from the work you’re contracted to do. If someone comes along with a better offer, don’t think you should stay because of “loyalty”. While no employer, I have ever worked for likes laying people off, or in fact has done it except where there’s been good reason to do it, neither will any employer avoid making you redundant because you’re “loyal”. This person at Tesla seems to have found that out the hard way.

5. Fusion failures

There is no one better at writing about the core technology in the Mac than Howard Oakley, my former colleague at MacUser who spent several decades writing the help section. I don’t know how many readers Howard saved from some kind of technical jam, but it’s a lot. Howard probably knows more about the Mac than anyone outside of Cupertino (and most likely quite a lot more than most inside Cupertino), and this example looking at the technology of Fusion Drives (and why they fail) is a good example. He’s also one of the nicest people it has ever been my privilege to work with.

6. Fast fashion is bad, and Shein is the baddest

OK, maybe not the absolute worst, but there are good reasons to never buy anything from Shein if you want to avoid things like forced labour and the destruction of the planet.

7. And speaking of brutal companies

There are so many reasons why Amazon should be broken up, but this look at its absolutely atrocious business culture and ethics just adds to the pile.

8. You never think it will happen to you, until it happens to you

Gen X — my people! — are apparently finding it really tough to get jobs, thanks to a combination of ageism and, well, more ageism. We are, apparently, set in our ways and expensive, which means no one wants to hire us. And, of course, women get it worse than men.

9. The cost of doing business

The headline on this piece from Om says it all: “billions in profits, millions in fines”. Fines will never keep pace with the money that tech and comms companies can make from abusing customers. Only break-ups and active restrictions will ever work. I can’t think of a single example where a mere fine has caused a tech business to change its ways.

10. Tech journalism, or just “journalism”?

I left this one until last, and it’s a great piece: Asterisk Mag has had a look at the quality of technology journalism in the mainstream and found it wanting. It notes that it often focuses on scandals, personalities and sensationalism due to competitive pressures in the media industry, rather than, you know, actual insight into tech. And they are right, but I think even if you look outside the mainstream it’s pretty dire. Try reading the kind of in-depth technical analysis you got in Byte magazine and then looking through even Ars Technica (which is good by today’s standards) and you can see the difference. This is mostly down to economic pressure: at least from the perspective of journalists themselves, research shows that when times are tough, quality declines. And times, now, are very, very tough indeed.