I'm sure this question has been addressed by now, but seriously, WTF?
I was gratified to see this report (the day after I wrote my letter) that Apple is indeed “pausing” their advertising on Twitter. (I don’t take any credit for this.)
I can only hope that they don’t see fit to “resume” any time soon, given the present circumstances.
Comments closedThis evening, I sent the following email message to Tim Cook at Apple:
Dear Mr. Cook:
I have been an Apple user since 1981 and a Mac user since 1984; my first iPhone was an iPhone 4, but mostly because AT&T didn’t have good coverage in my home town. As I sit at my desk composing this email, there are eight Apple computing devices literally within arm’s reach, not to mention a couple of HomePods and a pair of AirPods.
Professionally, I wrote my first Mac program in 1984 (for a company mentioned in the first issue of Macworld magazine), and my first publicly released Mac software in 1987. My career path wandered a bit after that, but I have been developing Mac software for pay since 2006 and it has been my full-time job since 2009.
I write all this to establish some bona fides for my long relationship with, admiration of, and support for Apple Inc.
Like many people, I was driven to leave Twitter soon after its change of ownership, disturbed at first by the way he treated his employees and third-party developers, and afterwards by the increasing amount of hate speech and abhorrent messages being posted there, apparently not merely tolerated but encouraged by the new owner.
I have been somewhat dismayed that Apple continues to market itself there, but I am not naive, and I recognize that the goals of a major company are quite different from those of a private individual, and that it is necessary for a company to engage with potential customers on a variety of media.
But now I find myself driven to write this letter in response to news items from the last few days:
… to mention only a few.
I cannot believe that it continues to be in Apple’s best interest to have its valuable brand appear adjacent to such virulent, hateful content. Apparently, the leadership at IBM has reached a similar conclusion. I hope that you and the leadership team at Apple are already giving careful consideration to the effect of continuing to financially support such a platform.
At the top of Apple’s “Ethics and Compliance” page, above your name, is the statement: “We do the right thing, even when it’s not easy.”
I urge you to do the right thing.
Sincerely,
Russell Finn
Comments closedWell, I’ve finally managed to get my blog up and running again. It appears to have been offline since August of 2021 — at least, that was when the last automated backup arrived in my WPBackups mail folder. To be honest, my shouting-into-the-void needs had largely been met by Twitter (at least until last November), so I wasn’t in much of a hurry to investigate. But it seemed to make sense to self-verify my Mastodon profile, which meant getting this website back online. I took the opportunity to update my Linode instance from Ubuntu 2016.4 LTS to something newer, install the latest WordPress, etc.
It turns out that the plugin I had been using to get those regular backup emails was only sending me the contents of the database as a SQL file, whereas most of the online guides to “restoring” or “migrating” a WordPress site assume you have an XML-based export file. After a couple of false starts, I found this article which had the key to success: namely to create a new database and populate it from the SQL file, then install WordPress and point it at that database during the “five-minute install” process. At this point WordPress will say “You appear to have already installed WordPress; let me just bring your database up to date” and then you’re ready to go, more or less.
(I got an immediate error that included the name of the theme I had forgotten I was using. Reinstalling that was much more pleasant than trying to get something I liked out of the default WP themes that are based around the WP block editor, which seems like overkill for a simple text blog.)
Now that I’ve done all that, will I begin blogging regularly again? We’ll see; if so, it will likely be more articles on macOS and Swift programming, and fewer hot takes on hot button issues (which frankly I don’t have the energy to deal with these days).
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