More Obvious Commentary about the Smart Phone That Makes People Stupid
January 16, 2026
Adults are rabid about protecting kids. Whether it’s chalked up to instinct, love, or simple common sense, no one can argue that it’s necessary to guide and guard younger humans. A big debate these days is when it is appropriate to give kids their first smartphone. According to The New York Times, that should probably be never: “A Smartphone Before Age 12 Could Carry Health Risks, Study Says.”
The journal named Pediatrics reported that when kids younger than twelve are given a smartphone, they’re at a greater risk for poor sleep, obesity, and depression. These results were from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study that surveyed 10,500 kids. This is what they discovered:
“The younger that children under 12 were when they got their first smartphones, the study found, the greater their risk of obesity and poor sleep. The researchers also focused on a subset of children who hadn’t received a phone by age 12 and found that a year later, those who had acquired one had more harmful mental health symptoms and worse sleep than those who hadn’t.”
Kids equipped with smartphones spent less time socializing in person and are less inclined to exercise or prioritize sleep. All these activities are exceedingly important for developing minds. They’re stunting and seriously harming their growth with smartphones.
Smartphones are a tool like anything else. They’re seriously addicting because of their engagement. Videogames were given the same bad rep when they became popular. At least videogames had the social interaction of arcades back in the day.
Just ban all smartphones for kids. That could work if the lobbyists and political funding policies undergo a little change. If not, duh.
Whitney Grace, January 16, 2026
Apple and Google: Lots of Nots, Nos, and Talk
January 15, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
This is the dinobaby, an 81 year old dinobaby. In my 60 plus year work career I have been around, in, and through what I call “not and no” PR. The basic idea is that one floods the zones with statements about what an organization will do. Examples range from “our Wi-Fi sniffers will not log home access point data” to “our AI service will not capture personal details” to “our security policies will not hamper usability of our devices.” I could go on, but each of these statements were uttered in meetings, in conference “hallway” conversations, or in public podcasts.
Thanks, Venice.ai. Good enough. See I am prevaricating. This image sucks. The logos are weird. GW looks like a wax figure.
I want to tell you that if the Nots and Nos identified in the flood of write ups about the Apple Google AI tie up immutable like Milton’s description of his God, the nots and nos are essentially pre-emptive PR. Both firms are data collection systems. The nature of the online world is that data are logged, metadata captured and mindlessly processed for a statistical signal, and content processed simply because “why not?”
Here’s a representative write up about the Apple Google nots and nos: “Report: Apple to Fine-Tune Gemini Independently, No Google Branding on Siri, More.” So what’s the more that these estimable firms will not do? Here’s an example:
Although the final experience may change from the current implementation, this partly echoes a Bloomberg report from late last year, in which Mark Gurman said: “I don’t expect either company to ever discuss this partnership publicly, and you shouldn’t expect this to mean Siri will be flooded with Google services or Gemini features already found on Android devices. It just means Siri will be powered by a model that can actually provide the AI features that users expect — all with an Apple user interface.”
How about this write up: “Official: Apple Intelligence & Siri To Be Powered By Google Gemini.”
Source details how Apple’s Gemini deal works: new Siri features launching in spring and at WWDC, Apple can finetune Gemini, no Google branding, and more
Let’s think about what a person who thinks the way my team does. Here are what we can do with these nots and nos:
- Just log everything and don’t talk about the data
- Develop specialized features that provide new information about use of the AI service
- Monitor the actions of our partners so we can be prepared or just pounce on good ideas captured with our “phone home” code
- Skew the functionality so that our partners become more dependent on our products and services; for example, exclusive features only for their users.
The possibilities are endless. Depending upon the incentives and controls put in place for this tie up, the employees of Apple and Google may do what’s needed to hit their goals. One can do PR about what won’t happen but the reality of certain big technology companies is that these outfits defy normal ethical boundaries, view themselves as the equivalent of nation states, and have a track record of insisting that bending mobile devices do not bend and that information of a personal nature is not cross correlated.
Watch the pre-emptive PR moves by Apple and Google. These outfits care about their worlds, not those of the user.
Just keep in mind that I am an old, very old, dinobaby. I have some experience in these matters.
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2025
Gambling Is An Addiction & The Internet Starts ‘Em Young
January 8, 2026
Robert Custer was a psychiatrist who promoted the theory that gambling addition was a mental disorder. His pioneering research is the basis for modern treatments of gambling disorder. Since Custer’s prime in the 1970s and 1980s, gambling has exploded, not just with brick and mortar casinos, but also online gambling and expansion of mobile sports betting. Science News discusses the rising tide of online gambling in the article, “As Gambling Addiction Spreads, One Scientist’s Work Reveals Timely Insights.”
Custer’s research is more relevant now than ever especially as the behavior is nurtured in kids from the moment they can hold a mobile device. Custer fought to include the disorder in the DSM and he succeeded:
“Custer argued that pathological gambling was not just a matter of an individual’s building and releasing tension. Rather, pathological gambling followed a progressive course from slightly unhealthy gambling behaviors to increasingly problematic wagering with tangible financial and social consequences. As a result, the committee incorporated the common consequences Custer saw in his clinical experience — such as defaulting on debts, borrowing money and struggling with family relationships — as diagnostic criteria to better identify those suffering. So, while pathological gambling remained alongside impulse control disorders in the DSM-III, its description and diagnostic criteria more closely mirrored the way the manual approached substance use disorders.”
Kids become addicted to online games that mimic the same dopamine release that gamblers experience. Social media giants are huge enablers of this behavior but so is Telegram. Telegram wants to hook the kids young so they’ll be addicted until the day they fall into a hole. It’s despicable and makes you want to toss a kid outside with a ball and stick. Go outside!
Whitney Grace, January 8, 2025
No Phones, Boys Get Smarter. Yeah
December 11, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I am busy with a new white paper, but one of my team called this short item to my attention. Despite my dislike of interruptions, “School Cell Phone Bans and Student Achievement” sparked my putting down one thing and addressing this research study. No, I don’t know the sample size, and I did not investigate it. No, I don’t know what methods were used to parse the information and spit out the graphic, and I did not invest time to poke around.
Young females having lunch with their mobile phones in hand cannot believe the school’s football star now gets higher test scores. Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
The main point of the research report, in my opinion, is to provide proof positive that mobile phones in classrooms interfere with student learning. Now, I don’t know about you, but my reaction is, “You did not know that?” I taught for a mercifully short time before I dropped out of my Ph.D. program and took a job at Halliburton’s nuclear unit. (Dick Cheney worked at Halliburton. Remember him?)
The write up from NBER.org states:
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before.
But here’s the statement that caught my attention:
Test score improvements were also concentrated among male students (up 1.4 percentiles, on average) and among middle and high school students (up 1.3 percentiles, on average).
But what about the females? Why did this group not show “boy level” improvement? I don’t know much about young people in middle and high school. However, based on observation of young people at the Blaze discount pizza restaurant, females who seem to me to be in middle school and high school do three things simultaneously:
- Chatter excitedly with their friends
- Eat pizza
- Interact with their phones or watch what’s on the screen while doing [1] and [2].
I think more research is needed. I know from some previous research that females outperform males academically up to a certain age. How does mobile phone usage impact this data, assuming those data which I dimly recall are or were accurate? Do mobile devices hold males back until the mobiles are removed and then, like magic, do these individuals manifest higher academic performance?
Maybe the data in the NBER report are accurate, but the idea that males — often prone to playing games, fooling around, and napping in class — benefit more from a mobile ban than females is interesting. The problem is I am not sure that the statement lines up with my experience.
But I am a dinobaby, just one that is not easily distracted unless an interesting actual factual research reports catches my attention.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2025
Mobile Hooking People: Digital Drugs
November 10, 2025
Most of us know that spending too much time on our phones is a bad idea, especially for young minds. We also know the companies on the other end profit from keeping us glued to the screen. The Conversation examines the ways “Smartphones Manipulate our Emotions and Trigger our Reflexes– No Wonder We’re Addicted.” Yes–try taking a 12 year old’s mobile phone and let us know how that goes.
Of course, social media, AI chatbots, games, and other platforms have their own ways of capturing our attention. This article, however, focuses on ways the phones themselves manipulate users. Author Stephen Monteiro writes:
“As I argue in my newly published book, Needy Media: How Tech Gets Personal, our phones — and more recently, our watches — have become animated beings in our lives. These devices can build bonds with us by recognizing our presence and reacting to our bodies. Packed with a growing range of technical features that target our sensory and psychological soft spots, smartphones create comforting ties that keep us picking them up. The emotional cues designed into these objects and interfaces imply that they need our attention, while in actuality, the devices are soaking up our data.”
The write-up explores how phones’ responsive features, like facial recognition, geolocation, touchscreen interactions, vibrations and sounds, and motion and audio sensing, combine to build a potent emotional attachment. Meanwhile, devices have drastically increased how much information they collect and when. They constantly record data on everything we do on our phones and even in our environments. One chilling example: With those sensors, software can build a fairly accurate record of our sleep patterns. Combine that with health and wellness apps, and that gives app-makers a surprisingly comprehensive picture. Have you seen any eerily insightful ads for fitness, medical, or mindfulness products lately? Soon, they will be even be able to gauge our emotions through analysis of our facial expressions. Just what we need.
Given a cell phone is pretty much required to navigate life these days, what are we to do? Monteiro suggests:
“We can access device settings and activate only those features we truly require, adjusting them now and again as our habits and lifestyles change. Turning on geolocation only when we need navigation support, for example, increases privacy and helps break the belief that a phone and a user are an inseparable pair. Limiting sound and haptic alerts can gain us some independence, while opting for a passcode over facial recognition locks reminds us the device is a machine and not a friend. This may also make it harder for others to access the device.”
If these measures do not suffice, one can go retro with a “dumb” phone. Apparently, that is a trend among Gen Z. Perhaps there is hope for humanity yet.
Cynthia Murrell, November 10, 2025
Google Bricks Up Its Walled Garden
October 8, 2025
Google is adding bricks to its garden wall, insisting Android-app developers must pay up or stay out. Neowin declares, “Google’s Shocking Developer Decree Struggles to Justify the Urgent Threat to F-Droid.” The new edict requires anyone developing an app for Android to register with Google, whether or not they sell through its Play Store. Registration requires paying a fee, uploading personal IDs, and agreeing to Google’s fine print.
The measure will have a large impact on alternative app stores like F-Droid. That open-source publisher, with its focus on privacy, is particularly concerned about the requirements. In fact, it would rather shutter its project than force developers to register with Google. That would mean thousands of verified apps will vanish from the Web, never to be downloaded or updated again. F-Droid suspects Google’s motives are far from pure. Writer Paul Hill tells us:
“F-Droid has questioned whether forced registration will really solve anything because lots of malware apps have been found in the Google Play Store over the years, demonstrating that corporate gatekeeping doesn’t mean users are protected. F-Droid also points out that Google already defends users against malicious third-party apps with the Play Protect services which scan and disable malware apps, regardless of their origin. While not true for all alternative app stores, F-Droid already has strong security because the apps it includes are all open source that anyone can audit, the build logs are public, and builds are reproducible. When you submit an app to F-Droid, the maintainers help set up your repository properly so that when you publish an update to your code, F-Droid’s servers manually build the executable, this prevents the addition of any malware not in the source code.”
Sounds at least as secure as the Play Store to us. So what is really going on? The write-up states:
“The F-Droid project has said that it doesn’t believe that the developer registration is motivated by security. Instead, it thinks that Google is trying to consolidate power by tightening control over a formerly open ecosystem. It said that by tying application identifiers to personal ID checks and fees, it creates a choke point that restricts competition and limits user freedom.”
F-Droid is responding with a call for regulators to scrutinize this and other Googley moves for monopolistic tendencies. It also wants safeguards for app stores that wish to protect developers’ privacy. Who will win this struggle between independent app stores and the tech giant?
Cynthia Murrell, October 8, 2025
Brainyfone or Foneybrain?
June 16, 2025
If you spend too much time on your phone raise your hand. We’re not snoops, so we haven’t activated your device’s camera to spy on you. We’ll just affirm that you have and tell you what the BBC wrote: “How Mobile Phones Have Changed Our Brains.” We feel guilty about being on the phone so much, but it’s a very convenient tool.
Adults check their phone on average 344 times a day-once every four minutes. YIKES! We use our phones to complete a task and that leads to other activities like checking email, visiting social media, etc. Our neural pathways are being restructured to rely on phones. Here’s what it does:
“As you might expect, with our societal dependence on devices increasing rapidly every year, the research struggles to keep up. What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking a phone or seeing a notification can have negative consequences. This isn’t very surprising; we know that, in general, multitasking impairs memory and performance. One of the most dangerous examples is phone use while driving. One study found that merely speaking on the phone, not texting, was enough to make drivers slower to react on the road. It’s true for everyday tasks that are less high-stakes, too. Simply hearing a notification "ding" made participants of another study perform far worse on a task – almost as badly as participants who were speaking or texting on the phone during the task.”
Phones don’t contribute entirely to brain drain. The article did report on a study that did support the theory phones atrophy memory. Another study supported that phones helped improve memory when participants were allowed to make notes with their phone.
The articles makes a thought-provoking assertion:
“Individuals who think that our brains have "limited" resources (such as that resisting one temptation makes it harder to resist the next) are indeed more likely to exhibit this phenomenon in testing. But for those who think that the more we resist temptation, the more we’re strengthening the capacity to keep resisting temptation – that our brains, in other words, have unlimited resources. Exerting self-control or mental fatigue on one task doesn’t negatively affect their performance on the next one.
More fascinatingly still, whether we have a limited or non-limited view of the brain may be largely cultural – and that Western countries like the US may be more likely to think the mind is limited compared to other cultures, such as India.”
We’re not as limited as we think we are and the brain we adapt to mobile devices. However, it’s still healthy to get off your phones.
Whitney Grace, June 16, 2025
Another Vote for the Everything App
June 13, 2025
Just a dinobaby and no AI: How horrible an approach?
An online information service named 9 to 5 Mac published an essay / interview summary titled “Nothing CEO says Apple No Longer Creative; Smartphone Future Is a Single App.” The write up focuses on the “inventor / coordinator” of the OnePlus mobile devices and the Nothing Phone. The key point of the write up is the idea that at some point in the future, one will have a mobile device and a single app, the everything app.
The article quotes a statement Carl Pei (the head of the Nothing Phone) made to another publication; to wit:
I believe that in the future, the entire phone will only have one app—and that will be the OS. The OS will know its user well and will be optimized for that person […] The next step after data-driven personalization, in my opinion, is automation. That is, the system knows you, knows who you are, and knows what you want. For example, the system knows your situation, time, place, and schedule, and it suggests what you should do. Right now, you have to go through a step-by-step process of figuring out for yourself what you want to do, then unlocking your smartphone and going through it step by step. In the future, your phone will suggest what you want to do and then do it automatically for you. So it will be agentic and automated and proactive.
This type of device will arrive in seven to 10 years.
For me, the notion of an everything app or a super app began in 2010, but I am not sure who first mentioned the phrase to me. I know that WeChat, the Chinese everything app, became available in 2011. The Chinese government was aware at some point that an “everything” app would make surveillance, social scoring, and filtering much easier. The “let many approved flowers bloom” approach of the Apple and Google online app stores was inefficient. One app was more direct, and I think the A to B approach to tracking and blocking online activity makes sense to many in the Middle Kingdom. The trade off of convenience for a Really Big Brother was okay with citizens of China. Go along and get along may have informed the uptake of WeChat.
Now the everything app seems like a sure bet. The unknown is which outstanding technology firm will prevail. The candidates are WeChat, Telegram, X.com, Sam Altman’s new venture, or a surprise player. Will other apps (the not everything apps from restaurant menus to car washes) survive? Sure. But if Sam AI-Man is successful with his Ive smart device and his stated goal of buying the Chrome browser from the Google catch on, the winner may be a CEO who was fired by his board, came back, and cleaned out those who did not jump on the AI-Man’s bandwagon.
That’s an interesting thought. It is Friday the 13th, Google. You too Microsoft. And Apple. How could I have forgotten Tim Cook and his team of AI adepts?
Stephen E Arnold, June 13, 2025
Can You Detox When Everyone Is Addicted to Online?
June 5, 2025
Digital detox has been a thing for a while and it’s where you go off the grid. No phone. No computer. No Internet. The Internet and mobile devices are so ingrained into our consciousness that it’s a reflex to check for messages, social media, etc. Amanda Kooser at CNet when an entire day without the Internet and describes what happens in: “24 Hours Without Internet: I Tried This Digital Detox and Thrived.”
Kooser set some ground rules to ensure her digital detox would be successful. She unplugged her Internet router to disable WiFi and connected Internet. She enabled Focus Mode on all her devices to silence them.
She started her day by waking up with a non-phone alarm clock, read a book, then headed to work without the use of Google maps. She got lost but used good, old-fashioned directions to arrive at her destination. Kooser also watched TV with an antenna instead of streaming her shows. She learned that antenna TV sucks.
Here’s her overall opinion:
“The best part of having no internet for the day was the pause on micro-interruptions — all the little things that steal attention: neighborhood alerts, store sales and emails that need to be deleted. I enjoyed the quiet so much that I didn’t turn the T-Mobile 5G Home Internet gateway back on until Sunday morning, 36 hours after the digital detox experiment began. I’m working on being better about reaching for my phone for every little thing. Now that I’ve unlocked the full power of Focus Mode, I can put it into service. I can have my quiet moments on top of a mountain where the only alerts are the squirrels calling from the trees. I’ve already developed a sense of nostalgia for my internet-free day. It’s a rosy memory of fun times in the car listening to the classic rock station on the radio, not knowing if we would find our destination, not worrying that it even mattered.”
Now back to the question, “Can you detox when everyone is addicted to online?” Answer: Not easily and maybe not at all. Think a fish in a fish bowl, can that creature stop looking out through his bowl?
Whitney Grace, June 5, 2025
Stolen iPhone Building: Just One Building?
May 21, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
I am not too familiar with the outfits which make hardware and software to access mobile phones. I have heard that these gizmos exist and work. Years ago I learned that some companies — well, one company lo those many years ago — could send a text message to a mobile phone and gain access to the device. I have heard that accessing iPhones and some Androids is a tedious business. I have heard that some firms manufacture specialized data retention computers to support the work required to access certain actors’ devices.
So what?
And what happens? The weird orange newspaper published “Inside China’s Stolen iPhone Building.” The write up is from a “real news” outfit, the Financial Times. The story — if dead accurate — may be a reminder that cyber security has been gifted with another hole in its predictive, forward-leaning capabilities.
The write up explains how phones are broken down, parts sold, or (if unlocked) resold. But there is one passage in the write up which hip hops over what may be the “real” story. Here’s the passage:
Li [a Financial Times’ named source Kevin Li, who is an iPhone seller] insisted there was no way for phone sellers to force their way into passcode-locked devices. But posts on western social media show that many who have their phones stolen receive messages from individuals in Shenzhen either cajoling them or threatening them to remotely wipe their devices and remove them from the FindMy app. “For devices that have IDs, there aren’t that many places that have demand for them,” says Li, finishing his cigarette break. “In Shenzhen, there is demand . . . it’s a massive market.”
With the pool of engineering and practical technical talent, is it possible that this “market” in China houses organizations or individuals who can:
- Modify an unlocked phone so that it can operate as a node in a larger network?
- Use software — possibly similar to that developed by NSO Group-type entities — to compromise mobile devices. Then these devices are not resold if they contain high-value information. The “customer” could be a third party like an intelligence technology firm or to a government entity in a list of known buyers?
- Use devices which emulate the functions of certain intelware-centric companies to extract information and further industrialize the process of returning a used mobile to an “as new” condition.
Are these questions ones of interest to the readership of the Financial Times in the British government and its allies? Could the Financial Times ignore the mundane refurbishment market and focus on the “massive market” for devices that are not supposed to be unlocked?
Answer: Nope. Write about what could be said about refurbing iPads, electric bicycles, or smart microwaves. The key paragraph reveals that that building in China is probably one which could shed some light on what is an important business. If specialized hardware and software exist in the US and Western Europe, there is a reasonable chance that similar capabilities are available in the “iPhone building.” That’s a possible “real” story.
Stephen E Arnold, May xx, 2025
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