Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud – Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider
related: Getting off US tech: a guide – Personally, I’m not comfortable framing it as “dropping US tech services”. It’s not about nationalism, or boycotting specific nations for me; it’s about controlling your own data (or your nation controlling its own data) rather than it being strip-mined by TechBros.
Extracting books from production language models [PDF] – “We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude…substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so”
European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy – The EU is working on what is in essence a new Open Source strategy for Europe, and the call for evidence is now open. If you’re a European hippie communist, you can provide input.
Because I’m so the rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve been reading the summary of responses to the first review of the Digital Markets Act. There were “450 contributions submitted by a broad range of interested parties, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), gatekeepers, civil society organisations, academics, and individual citizens”.
The report contains many surprises. Some of them might shock you.
Several respondents argued that fines so far have been too slow to deter non-compliance while penalties for repeat non-compliances should be higher.
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers, in contrast, argued for proportionate fines, based on EU revenues only and only for deliberate or repeated violations.
The summary continues:
Business users, SMEs, civil society, and some legal experts expressed concerns that public summaries of compliance reports lack sufficient detail, are not independently verified, and do not provide meaningful information for assessing outcomes.
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers on the other hand emphasised the significant resources invested in compliance but argued that overly prescriptive reporting expectations could limit flexibility
Many respondents reported early positive effects of the DMA:
more consistent browser and app-choice opportunities, the ability to uninstall default applications, the emergence of alternative app marketplace options on Apple’s iOS, more freedom regarding app distribution … and new data portability solutions …
many respondents agreed that, to contribute to achieving the DMA’s objective of fairer and more contestable digital markets, enforcement of the DMA needs to be sustained, effective and well-resourced
But – surprise!
Gatekeepers and several respondents affiliated to gatekeepers voiced a number a criticisms notably regarding negative impact on innovation and user experience, as well as concerns that implementation of certain obligations is disproportionate.
TL;DR: most people think DMA is starting to work, and want more.
But – surprise! – massive corporations with profits as large as small nations, derived from years of monopolistic rent extraction, are Very Sad. Obeying laws is tricky, and can cost almost as much as their Chief Counsel’s mahogany desk. And how can they guarantee your comfort and security if they can’t control what is (allegedly) your machine?
Farewell, 2025. It was my first full year working at Vivaldi, which will never make me rich but allows me to work with great people, do interesting things, and not worry that my soul is rotting. I only spoke at a couple of conferences: CSS Day in Amsterdam, and was an MC at the excellent Birmingham grassroots TechMids, organised by the newly-enobled Dr Tom Goodman.
Work travel becomes increasingly hellish as I age, but I went to Brussels to bother Regulators about Microsoft a couple of times by train (57 times nicer than flying, even if it takes slightly longer), and went to Oslol to see my chums in Vivaldi HQ. I went to New York for a whole three days (!), which will be my last US trip under the current regime. I also squeezed in a brief holiday in Türkiye.
A lot happened in 2025 for browsers and web apps with new investigations, laws, and court cases across the EU, Japan, the US, Australia, and the UK… Apple is now barred from blocking third-party browser engines on iOS in 28 countries, soon likely 30. However, it continues to resist real competition.
Personally, I released my third album with the cruellest months, called On the Air, which you should definitely listen to and buy for a mere £5.
In other, very personal, news, I had a colonoscopy, which was unfun (but not painful). You can read all about my colonoscopy fun, should you be facing one of these any time.
2026 will be an “exciting” year, I think. Across Europe, people and organisations are becoming disenchanted with relying on Big Tech. Within just four months between Proof of Concept and rollout, Austria’s Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism went live with a secure Nextcloud environment, operated on its own infrastructure in Austria and designed to meet strict transparency and compliance requirements. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein migrated to Open Source Email Systems. MEPs have written to its President to demand digital sovereignty in the EU Parliament, citing a range of European alternatives, including Vivaldi.
Danmark Skifter [Denmark shifts] is a national campaign from from January 1 to March 20, 2026, in which thousands of Danes will “take back control of their digital lives – not alone, but together”. European alternatives lists “European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products”. I moved my 80 year old mum from Windows to Linux.
Most Big Tech happens to be in the USA, and its current administration is unlikely to be delighted by pesky European communists wanting autonomy. The US Government has already sanctioned a former EU commissioner and four Europeans over EU legislation to curb online hate speech. Big Tech firms are affronted that their Manifest Web Destiny is being challenged; expect Apple to become especially litigious.
Of course, I will fight on as I have been doing, both before and during my employment with Vivaldi. I’ll work with other browsers and civil society organisations, to keep the web open, and free,
My personal resolutions: I shall also try to lose some of my middle-aged paunchiness, and drink less beer (I suspect that there might be a link between the two). I shall also try to release my fourth album, and remain utterly gorgeous.
The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 – “median mobile page is now 70 times larger than the total storage of the computer that landed men on the moon … The result is a web that increasingly punishes the poor for their bad luck while paying developers huge salaries to deliver business-undermining results” writes Big Al Russell
requestPictureInPicture() (PiP / PinP) does not work in Home Screen Web Apps (PWA) on iOS/iPadOS – “Multiple developers have independently reported this issue over the past four years … This significantly degrades the value proposition of Home Screen web apps compared to the same experience in Safari on the same device, PWAs on other platforms where PiP works in standalone mode”. It’s almost as if Apple want to hobble PWAs just enough to make them unviable, but functional enough to claim to regulators that there is a distribution channel outside the App Store and the Apple Tax!
Where Do the Children Play? On the need for a world without us -“Western children are almost comically sheltered. But in digital space, they’re entirely beyond our command; and increasingly, that’s where children spend most of their time. You don’t need me to tell you about the dire consequences of that shift. Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies … I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us”
Remove Windows Ai – “The current 25H2 build of Windows 11 and future builds will include increasingly more AI features and components. This script aims to remove ALL of these features to improve user experience, privacy and security.”
The world needs social sovereignty – “By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay … The promise of the fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms”
So Long and Thanks for All the Applets – So farewell, Java Applets: “The entire java.applet package has been removed from JDK 26, which will release in March 2026.”
Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer – a WordPress plugin designed to combat link rot. It automatically scans your post contentto detect outbound links, checks the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for an archived version and creates a snapshot if one isn’t available. When a linked page disappears, the plugin helps preserve your user experience by redirecting visitors to a reliable archived version.
SVG Cickjacking – “Clickjacking is a classic attack that consists of covering up an iframe of some other website in an attempt to trick the user into unintentionally interacting with it. It works great if you need to trick someone into pressing a button or two, but for anything more complicated it’s kind of unrealistic. I’ve discovered a new technique that turns classic clickjacking on its head and enables the creation of complex interactive clickjacking attacks, as well as multiple forms of data exfiltration.”
Top Lobbyists 2025 – Huge congrats to Apple, ACT/ The App Association, AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, who are named in The Hill’s “Top lobbyists of 2025”, along with other loved and trusted brands like Philip Morris, ExxonMobil, Boeing, Occidental Petroleum, Lockheed Martin, and McDonalds.
Masonry: Things You Won’t Need A Library For Anymore – a nice overview of things that you don’t need JS for, if you’ve been out of Web Platform World for more than 15 mins (eg, in Framework Limbo or Full Stack Purgatory), and a look at CSS Masonry from glamorous Patrick “Edge” Brosset
WebGPU is now supported in major browsers – “This significant milestone results from years of extensive collaborative development by the W3C GPU for the Web Working Group, with contributions from companies including Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Mozilla.”
A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size – Anthropic: “as few as 250 malicious documents can produce a “backdoor” vulnerability in a large language model—regardless of model size or training data volume.”
I was excited to see that the proposed new Web Install API has entered Origin Trial in Chromium. It kind of works in Chromium Canary, but is most complete in Microsoft Edge beta (or, if you’re reading this after December 2025, starting with version 143). This makes sense, as the work has been done by the Edge team in Microsoft.
The reason I was excited is because I read the Web install API explainer when it was announced a few months ago:
The Web Install API provides a way to democratise and decentralise web application acquisition, by enabling “do-it-yourself” end users and developers to have control over the application discovery and distribution process. It provides the tools needed to allow a web site to install a web app. This means end users have the option to more easily discover new applications and experiences that they can acquire with reduced friction.
The current way of acquiring a web app may involve search, navigation, proprietary protocols, proprietary app banners, and multiple other workarounds. This can be confusing for end users that must learn how to acquire apps in every different platform, with even different browsers handling the acquisition process differently.
The web platform doesn’t have a built-in way to facilitate app discovery and distribution, the Web Install API aims to fix this.
Let’s dive in. As someone who doesn’t habitually use Edge, it took me a while to find the beta – download it from the Insider Channel. You’ll need to go to chrome://flags and enable Web App Installation API and then restart the browser.
There’s a nice demo page called Edge Demos, laid out with CSS Masonry (Rachel Remix), which can be installed as a standalone Web App. Clicking the Install button shows a normal (browser-generated) permission dialog:
Install Edge Demos app
Publisher: microsoftedge.github.io
Use this site often? Install the app which:
• Opens in a focused window
• Has quick access options like pin to Dock
• Syncs across multiple devices
Clicking ‘install’ opens a new window, in which the site is installed stand-alone:
As the site is itself an “App store”, I can install another app with a similar UX (although it’s not clear to me why the ‘use this site often?’ wording has changed):
And this too opens full-window, with no browser chrome:
Each of these installed apps shows up as a separate app when I do cmd+tab (on a Mac)
If you try to install an app that’s already installed in Edge, it knows this and shows a dialog “Open with…” or “Not now” (note to Microsoft: “no” is a perfectly good English word). I don’t know how you uninstall an app; on a Mac, they’re stored in Applications > Edge Beta Apps, but when I deleted them and re-started the browser, they were still installed. This doesn’t worry me; this isn’t on the open web, and it’s an origin trial of the API, not the UI.
The Webkitephant in the room
Of course, there’s a big question about Apple, who try their best to hide installation of Web Apps on iOS (and last year, even tried to kill all PWAs in the EU).
iOS also has its own proprietary MarketplaceKit which “enables alternative app marketplaces to install the apps they distribute to peoples’ devices”, but only in the European Union, and you must go cap-in-hand to Apple to ask for entitlement, provide Apple a stand-by letter of credit in the amount of €1,000,000 from a financial institution (or be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU), and pay Apple €0.50 for each first annual install of their marketplace app.
However, Diego González, the glamorous PM for PWAs on the Edge team, said on Mastodon
in scope of the W3C WebApps WG, Firefox, Safari and Chromium agreed to work on ‘current document’ installation. There’s discussion on a declarative way of enabling this as well, so there is cross-vendor progress
I notice that in the explainer, one of the people thanked for input is Marcos Cáceres. Marcos is a glamorous and jolly good chap who is now at Apple, but previously worked with me at Opera on W3C Widgets (a precursor to Web Apps) and then later on the W3C Web App Manifest spec that, along with Service Worker, powers lots of lovely PWAs today. He’s someone who has worked for years to make Web Apps work well (even at Apple; along with Microsoft, he was one of the editors of the Badging API spec). So I’m cautiously hopeful.
now this means to start we’d only get ability to install the same page you’re browsing, but the cross-site install is something that continues discussion on WICG.
In the meantime, in Chromium we are committed to enabling and experimenting with ‘background-document’ installations.
I admit I’m not known for complimenting Microsoft’s management and their browser tactics at the Operating System level, but I have huge respect for chums on the Edge team for their standards work. I hope the origin trials are successful, so that the Web Install API and <install> element come to the web platform and all browsers, including on iOS where, so far, there is still a WebKit monopoly.
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.7 for desktop and mobile, with features requested by users rather than planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.
The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop – “If I had to guess why neither of Google’s Quick Share posts mentions Wi-Fi interoperability standards or the DMA… it may be that Google doesn’t want to explicitly credit or praise the DMA. …For its part, Apple recently called for the DMA to be repealed entirely”. Interop, drop by (air)drop
The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power – “Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage… Enforcing Europe’s data rules would not only protect our democracies and children from nasty algorithms, it would also disrupt big tech’s cascading monopolies across Europe. Crucially for Europe’s competitiveness, this is what would create the space for European tech SMEs and startups to scale up everywhere in Europe.”
Apple Loses Landmark U.K. Lawsuit Over App Store Commissions – Gruber saying extraordinary truths about Apple’s losing strategy of thumbing its nose at regulators over the App Store: “”Apple has approached all this regulatory conflict from a perspective that they’re right, and the regulators are wrong … However Apple thinks all of this should work out is not the way it is working out.”
Recall for Linux – “Are you forced to work with Linux? Do you miss the convenience of Microsoft spying on you and keeping track of everything? Fear not!”
Wheel running in the wild – “If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature, they are frequently used by wild mice, also when no extrinsic reward is provided. … Wheel movement not caused by mice was caused by shrews, rats, snails, slugs or frogs”
I recently listened to a podcast called Decoder with Nilay Patel, in which Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed. Nilay asked Sir Uncle Timbo about browser competition on iOS. I’m happy to report that the inventor of the Web agrees with me that Apple inexplicably doesn’t want the Web to compete with its single-platform rent-extraction App Store.
Unfortunately, you can only access a transcript if you’re a subscriber (yes, really!), but the audio is downloadable and I own MacWhisper, so here’s the salient part:
Nilay: But up until now, Apple has not allowed anything but WebKit on the iPhone. Even Chrome on the iPhone has a skin over the top of the core browser engine WebKit. Do you think that Apple being made to allow Chromium to run on the iPhone, for example, will actually lead to new browser innovation?
Tim: I can’t tell, but to have competition to allow Chromium to run on iPhone sounds like a good move… When you have a competition between different sections of the layer, it tends to improve innovation. You get more bright ideas out there … I’ve heard rumours that [the], but I can’t substantiate them, Apple is deliberately slowing down WebKit on the phone in order to not compete with Apple native apps.
and slightly later:
Nilay: Progressive web apps on Android have not taken the world by storm. Do you think a more powerful browser on the iPhone would ever change that dynamic, or do you think people just want apps on phones?
Tim: I think more powerful browser on the iPhone will change that dynamic.
So that’s sorted. You’ve heard it from me, you’ve heard it from Big Al, you’ve heard it from OWA, you’ve heard it from the Japanese, UK and EU competition authorities, and now you’ve heard it from Sir Uncle Timbo himself. Your move, Evil Tim.
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. If you prefer to keep browsing human, without planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI inserting itself between you and the Web, Vivaldi has you covered.
Masonry: Watching a CSS Feature Evolve– “At the end of the day, standards get shaped by a mix of politics, technical trade-offs, and developer feedback. Consensus is messy, and it’s rarely about one side “winning.””
Keep Android Open – “In August 2025, Google announced that starting next year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google.” What this means for your rights, and how you can help.
Mediabunny – “A JavaScript library for reading, writing, and converting video and audio files. Directly in the browser, and faster than anybunny else.”
Austria’s Ministry of Economy takes decisive steps toward digital sovereignty – “Within just four months between Proof of Concept and rollout, the ministry went live with a secure Nextcloud environment, operated on its own infrastructure in Austria and designed to meet strict transparency and compliance requirements.”
FFmpeg Receives $100K in Funding from India’s FLOSS/fund Initiative – FFmpeg is set to receive $100,000 from FLOSS/fund, a program launched by Indian stockbroking firm Zerodha to give back to the ecosystem that made its success possible. The team noted that, while welcome, this funding “does not solve the funding problems behind FFmpeg and Open Source in general.”
The Human Only Public License – “while nobody cares about robots.txt, people care about licenses. There are automated tools to find and check software licenses and raise alarms if ‘bad’ ones are used. And I can guarantee that HOPL will brightly flash red.”
The first ever banner ad: why did it work so well? – 31 years ago this week, on 27 October 1994, the first ever banner ad went live (on hotwired.com). For over four months, 44% of those who saw it clicked on it. An article by the person who wrote that banner.
In May 2021, Dr Rachael Kent, Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy & Society Education in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, led a class action against Apple on behalf of 19.6 million UK consumers.
The complaint alleges that Apple abuses its dominant position through exclusion of any other app stores from iOS devices and the 30% surcharge that it imposes on apps that require payment at the point of download, subscription payments, or allow for in-app purchases (but not for “physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app”, for Reasons).
Yesterday (23 October 2025) the Competition Appeal Tribunal handed down its unanimous judgement:
In our view, [Apple’s] restrictions cannot sensibly be justified as being necessary or proportionate to deliver the benefits which Apple puts forward as flowing from its objective of an integrated and centralised system.
On the contrary, the competition which would exist absent the restrictions is in our view much more likely to deliver the benefits that consumers want, in the form and at the price point they want them.
The case was not heard in a vacuum; the Competition and Markets Authority gave evidence:
We also had the benefit of written observations from the Competition and Markets Authority (the
“CMA”), and oral opening and closing remarks from Mr Julian Gregory on behalf of the CMA. We found that very helpful and we are grateful for the CMA’s input.
and other regulatory regimes were studied:
The regulatory interventions in the EU, the Netherlands and South Korea all suggest that there is a perfectly workable outcome where iOS app distribution services and iOS in-app payments services are open to competition, without material impact on the services Apple provides.
Apple’s history was referenced:
From the earlier days of the iPhone, it appeared that this “walled garden” was a stated aim of Apple in the development of its iOS ecosystem. In an oft-quoted email in 20104, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, stated that the strategy of the company was to “tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”, so as to “make [the] Apple ecosystem even more sticky”.
Mr Jobs stated during the March 2008 launch event that Apple did not intend to make money from the App Store and that he hoped (but was unsure) that the Commission would cover the costs of running the App Store.
Apple tried its usual shtick that it monopolises services on iOS solely in order to protect the privacy and security of its customers. The Tribunal saw through this:
Apple has failed to establish that any performance, security or privacy benefits were attributable specifically to the restrictions it has imposed in relation to iOS app distribution and iOS in-app payments.
There is no reason why Apple cannot promote the choice it offers to users to transact through the App Store, with whatever enhanced protection Apple said it is able to deliver, as a means of differentiation. It is not necessary to remove user choice altogether to make that case.
In short, the restrictions relating to iOS app distribution are not necessary to provide iOS device users with the benefits which Apple said they are intended to promote and not proportionate to the objective of delivering those benefits.
In relation to the iOS in-app payment restrictions, Apple maintained similar arguments about security and privacy. In our judgement, these are unfounded…
As a monopolist in the market for iOS in-app payment services, it is not for Apple to seek to exclude potential market participants on the basis that users need to be protected from the perceived risks of using those alternative providers.
The Tribunal ordered damages to be paid, which is the difference between the calculated legitimate commission Apple should have charged, and the 30% it actually charged. It decided that 50% of that extra cost was passed on by developers to consumers, so all consumers who bought apps etc will be eligible for some level of payout. Interest of 8% is also payable. The amount wasn’t determined, but Dr Kent had asked for £1.5 billion.
Apple, of course, is very iSad about this, and will appeal. Of course it will; it will litigate everything, as it has a colossal legal budget and any delay is profit to a monopolist.
As I wring out another handkerchief, and hold an umbrella to shield Useless Dog from my torrent of sympathetic tears, I can’t help but think, “perhaps Apple should have just competed fairly, and not decided to be monopolistic arse-weasels”.
But it’s been an even bigger week for Dr Rachael Kent, who’s done a great service, fighting for tech consumers against monopolistic arse-weasels. She wrote
This isn’t just a win against the richest company in the world – it’s a win for consumers, for competition, and for the principle that no corporation, however powerful, is above the law.
Dr Kent, next time you’re in Birmingham, there’s a lamb and spinach balti and 7 pints of Guinness for you, on me and Vivaldi.
It’s a mere 4 years, 3 months and 22 days since a weird Australian developer and his brother contacted me to ask if I would be interested in speaking to UK competition regulators about Apple’s continuing holding back the Web (which I’d long been moaning about on Twitter). Today, the UK has finally designated Apple (and Google) strategic market status in mobile platforms because of their substantial and entrenched market power.
The fight isn’t over; now, the regulator will embark on a round of consulting about what remedies (if any) need to be ordered, to make Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google) behave themselves.
Apple will litgate this all the way, I’m sure. Yesterday, Apple took the EU to court, to argue that it’s “really mean” and “totally, like, not fair” to expect it to allow “stinky competitors” to access certain functions on iOS. Luckily, the Free Software Foundation Europe was on hand to argue on behalf of users.
So, I allow myself a brief pat on the back, and congratulate my erstwhile comrades at Open Web Advocacy, and all the other developers and associations who have helped get us here. I’m also grateful to Vivaldi browser who, since June last year, have employed me to look beautiful, and also to do this work (previously, I was self-funding).
