Local Mess (via Dan Goodin): We disclose a novel tracking method by Meta and Yandex potentially affecting billions of Android users. We found that native Android apps—including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser—silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes. These native Android apps receive browsers’ metadata, cookies and commands […]

Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Simon Willison:

Grok 4 Heavy is the “think much harder” version of Grok 4 that’s currently only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unlike regular Grok 4, has measures in place to prevent it from sharing its system prompt.

Most big LLMs do not share their system prompts, but xAI has made a show out of being transparent in that regard.

In related prompt transparency news, Grok’s retrospective on why Grok started spitting out antisemitic tropes last week included the text “You tell it like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct” as part of the system prompt blamed for the problem. That text isn’t present in the history of their previous published system prompts.

Given the past week of mishaps I think xAI would be wise to reaffirm their dedication to prompt transparency and set things up so the xai-org/grok-prompts repository updates automatically when new prompts are deployed — their current manual process for that is clearly not adequate for the job!

Transparently publishing system prompt changes to GitHub was xAI’s main “trust us” argument after the “white genocide in South Africa” fiasco mid-May. Turns out they don’t publish all of them.

Blake Brittain, reporting for Reuters:

Apple asked a U.S. appeals court on Monday to overturn a trade tribunal’s decision which forced it to remove blood-oxygen reading technology from its Apple Watches, in order to avoid a ban on its U.S. smartwatch imports.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit heard arguments from the tech giant, medical monitoring technology company Masimo, and the U.S. International Trade Commission over the ITC’s 2023 ruling that Apple Watches violated Masimo’s patent rights in pulse oximetry technology. [...]

Apple attorney Joseph Mueller of WilmerHale told the court on Monday that the decision had wrongly “deprived millions of Apple Watch users” of Apple’s blood-oxygen feature. A lawyer for Masimo, Joseph Re of Knobbe Martens Olson & Bear, countered that Apple was trying to “rewrite the law” with its arguments.

The judges questioned whether Masimo’s development of a competing smartwatch justified the ITC’s ruling. Apple has told the appeals court that the ban was improper because a Masimo wearable device covered by the patents was “purely hypothetical” when Masimo filed its ITC complaint in 2021. [...]

Mueller told the court on Monday that the ban was unjustified because Masimo only had prototypes of a smartwatch with pulse oximetry features when it had filed its ITC complaint. Re responded that Apple was wrong to argue that a “finished product” was necessary to justify the ITC’s decision.

This whole thing started with the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 in 2023. I’m very surprised that we’re just two months away from the Series 11 and Ultra 3 in 2025 and it still isn’t settled. And to be clear, while it’s technically an “import ban”, all Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Ultra 2 have the blood oxygen sensors. Units sold in the US after December 2023 simply have the feature disabled in software.

(Via Chance Miller at 9to5Mac.)