Month: June 2012

Do Not Track Must Be Off, By Default ⇥ arstechnica.com

Last week, Microsoft announced that IE10 would be shipping with the new “Do Not Track” feature turned on, and it was up to the user to turn it off. Now, it looks like advertisers have forced the specification to be changed, so that DNT is off by default:

Microsoft’s surprise announcement last Thursday was interpreted by many as a way to gouge Google, which runs an ad system based on tracking cookies. But it also enraged many online ad companies and industry groups, who saw the move as overly aggressive and a threat to their business model.

As Gruber noted, this feature would only block the ability for users to be tracked, not the ability for ads to be displayed. This leads to many questions:

Advertising networks that track user behavior are OK with “Do Not Track” only so long as a single-digit percentage of users have it turned on? But if a lot of people start using it they’re out? Not being able to track users across the web is a “nightmare” for ad networks?

If your business model only survives because it’s invasive to personal privacy, your business model sucks.

Wednesday Evening Trailer Roundup ⇥ trailers.apple.com

Flight:

In this action-packed mystery thriller, Academy Award winner Denzel Washington stars as Whip Whitaker, a seasoned airline pilot who miraculously crash-lands his plane after a mid-air catastrophe, saving nearly every soul on board. After the crash, Whip is hailed as a hero, but as more is learned, more questions than answers arise as to who or what was really at fault, and what really happened on that plane?

Denzel Washington is an incredible actor in these sorts of roles. The plot looks solid, and the trailer features “Gimme Shelter“, so you know it should be decent.

The non-teaser was just posted for The Bourne Legacy:

The narrative architect behind the Bourne film series, Tony Gilroy, takes the helm in the next chapter of the hugely popular espionage franchise that has earned almost $1 billion at the global box office: The Bourne Legacy. The writer/director expands the Bourne universe created by Robert Ludlum with an original story that introduces us to a new hero (Jeremy Renner) whose life-or-death stakes have been triggered by the events of the first three films. For The Bourne Legacy, Renner joins fellow series newcomers Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach and Oscar Isaac, while franchise veterans Albert Finney, Joan Allen, David Strathairn and Scott Glenn reprise their roles.

Jeremy Renner came out of nowhere a couple of years ago, and he’s doing some great work in action movies these days. Here’s hoping he does a little more drama in the future. Bourne should be good, though.

Finally, this is an excellent fan-made trailer to a potential Star Trek sequel.

Twitter Logo in CSS ⇥ labs.upperdog.se

Twitter announced their new bird logo today:

Our new bird grows out of love for ornithology, design within creative constraints, and simple geometry.

It’s a beautiful logo. In the spirit of Nike, Apple, and a host of other brands that are identified simply by a shape, Twitter feels confident enough that their bird stands alone, and doesn’t require their bubble letters any more.

In a quirky twist, Upperdog has reproduced the logo using only CSS shapes. I quite like it. Hover over the logo to see the borders.

The Canadian Grand Prix Preview ⇥ jamesallenonf1.com

James Allen:

Montreal is always one of the most interesting races of the season from a strategy point of view. With a very high likelihood of safety cars, a low grip surface and very easy overtaking, it is always an entertaining race.

The last race, Monaco, is one of the most overrated races in Formula 1, due to its lack of overtaking opportunity. It’s necessary in the calendar due to its historical nature, picture-perfect setting, and it just wouldn’t feel like F1 without it.

Montreal is one of the most underrated races on the calendar. It’s consistently entertaining, and last year’s race was one of the best yet, despite being the longest race in Formula 1 history.

Anxiety Over Apple Maps ⇥ massivegreatness.com

MG Siegler:

The mere fact that Google decided to hold a press conference just five days before WWDC (where Apple’s mapping product is widely expected to be unveiled) said pretty much all you needed to know. When it was announced last week, it seemed like it may have been thrown together at the last second to pre-empt Apple’s event. Now we can be positive that it was.

Steve Kovach, over at Business Insider:

We just finished watching Google’s presentation on all the updates for Google Maps.

It was boring.

Really, really boring.

I can’t wait to see what Apple is going to announce at WWDC on Monday, but I will be slightly saddened by the loss of Street View (at least until Google’s app comes out). As I’ve said before, the Street View experience on the iPhone and iPad is of superlative quality.

Prometheus ⇥ rogerebert.suntimes.com

Roger Ebert:

Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn’t have the answers.

Good enough for me.

Apple’s Hardware “Dilemma” ⇥ counternotions.com

The mysterious Kontra:

Apple has the best hardware-software-service integration in the industry, bar none. So the fact that the new device wars are now actually fought not on hardware specs but on vertical integration accords Apple a unique advantage.

LeakedOut ⇥ arstechnica.com

News broke earlier that 6.5 million LinkedIn users’ account passwords have been leaked to a Russian security forum:

The user uploaded 6,458,020 hashed passwords, but no usernames. It’s not clear if they managed to download the usernames, but it’s likely that both have been downloaded.There is a possibility that this could be a hoax, but several people have said on Twitter that they found their real LinkedIn passwords as hashes on the list.

Now, there are reports that iPhone and Android users’ calendars are being uploaded to LinkedIn’s server:

The LinkedIn app manages to gain access to your Calendar items because it has a feature that allows you to view your calendar from within the app itself. According to security researchers Yair Amit and Adi Sharabani, the app then transmits this information to LinkedIn’s servers without any clear indication to the user that this is hapening—a throwback to the Path controversy that revealed the social networking app (among many others) had been transmitting users’ contact lists to a remote server without explicit user consent.

Hopefully iOS 6 will be shipping with some new permissions controls.

Pre to Postmortem ⇥ theverge.com

Thirty-one.

That’s the number of months it took Palm, Inc. to go from the darling of International CES 2009 to a mere shadow of itself, a nearly anonymous division inside the HP machine without a hardware program and without the confidence of its owners. Thirty-one months is just barely longer than a typical American mobile phone contract.

Chris Ziegler has a phenomenal feature on The Verge regarding what is effectively the death of Palm and webOS. This is a fascinating story, assembled from discussions with those who helped write it.

Using Words Not Found in the Dictionary ⇥ opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

Erin McKean, for the New York Times:

Scholars recently analyzed more than five million digitized books, about 4 percent of all the books ever printed. Publishing their findings in “Science,” the researchers discovered that, by their estimation, “52 percent of the English lexicon – the majority of the words used in English books – consists of lexical ‘dark matter’ undocumented in standard references.”

I have something of a habit of using perfectly cromulent words like these occasionally to catch the reader off guard. But, as this eleven year-old article (also from the NY Times) summarizes, it’s best not to make writing sound like a writing exercise.

The Maps Soap Opera ⇥ online.wsj.com

If you’re reading this site, you probably already know that Apple will be rolling its own in-house mapping service with the release of iOS 6. The interesting thing about this article by Jessica E. Vascellaro and Amir Efrati is how they frame it with the rivalry between Apple and Google. The Maps application has been a long point of contention between the two companies, apparently:

Apple executives also wanted to include Google’s turn-by-turn-navigation service in the iPhone—a feature popular with Android users because it lets people treat their phones as in-car GPS devices. Google wouldn’t allow it, according to people on both sides. One of these people said Google viewed Apple’s terms as unfair.

Google executives, meantime, also bristled at Apple’s refusal to add features that would help Google. For instance, Google wanted to emphasize its brand name more prominently within the maps app. It also wanted Apple to enable its service designed to find friends nearby, dubbed Latitude, which Apple refrained from doing, said people on both sides.

Photo Permissions on iOS ⇥ subtraction.com

Khoi Vinh, on the poorly-worded iOS photo permissions dialog box:

From a technical perspective, this dialog box makes sense, because the sensitive information at question isn’t the photos but the location data. Nevertheless, it’s a very confusing way to ask the question, because most users don’t think of their photos as being anything more than just that — photos. But this dialog appears to regard photos as containers of location data, and emphasizes that characteristic more than any other.

I can’t count the number of times friends have asked me why an app on their iPhone needs location access just to deal with photos. This box needs to communicate its access to two intertwined parts of your phone, but only one is desired.

The Slow Death of the Ultrabook Begins ⇥ zdnet.com

Some hardware manufacturers are finding it difficult to comply with Intel’s requirements of what constitutes an “Ultrabook”, the Windows equivalent of the MacBook Air. Intel responded by changing the requirements to allow plastic bodies, not just metal ones. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes comments:

Once again, Apple has set a bar that others have to match up to. And it seems that the bar has been set too high.

Compromising on what an Ultrabook is supposed to be — especially this early in their lifecycle — does not bode well for the platform. To me, this feels like netbooks all over again, and it won’t be long before a promising platform is driven into the ground in an attempt to cost as many costs as possible.

Antivirus Homeopathy ⇥ twitter.com

Nicholas J. Percoco:

We (@SpiderLabs) investigated >300 breaches in 2011. 100% used malware. 0% detected by AV on targets. In lab top 25 AV engines detected 12%.

Read that again: zero percent of malware was detected by antivirus software in real-world conditions. In a lab, it was only twelve percent. Via Craig Hockenberry.

Silicon Valley as the New Hollywood ⇥ bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Nick Bilton:

It seems that the story of technology is no longer just a technology story. Instead, technology is now the new Hollywood.

Of course, Mr. Zuckerberg isn’t the only person being featured in the entertainment press. There is a long list of tech entrepreneurs who are increasingly splashed across glossy pages of magazines like People, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and pampered and beautified in elaborate photo shoots.

The publications I read have now merged into those which normal people read, but it doesn’t feel like it.

“Ari Emanuel, This Is Where I Work” ⇥ theverge.com

Josh Topolsky delivers his blistering criticism of Ari Emanuel’s dickish reply to his question at D10:

Now you probably haven’t seen much of the real Ari, but you’re likely familiar with the character of Ari Gold (played by Jeremy Piven) from HBO’s bro-fest, Entourage. That Ari is a raging, expletive-spewing egomaniac whom I always thought was a broad exaggeration of the real thing. On Wednesday night, I learned that was not the case.

Comprehensive iTunes Match Review ⇥ reddit.com

Speaking of iTunes Match, Reddit user “Synchrotron” has a rather good review of the service. After reading it, I’m certain I don’t trust it. For example:

Some songs (especially rap/hip hop music) can be mismatched. Within the context of hip hop music, if there is a “clean” album then your uncensored tracks may be the clean edit when upgraded. This adds a lot of burden of finding out if it upgraded you to the wrong file if you have a large number of rap songs.

I’m not immature, but nor am I a prude. If Nas wants to say “fuck”, iTunes had better let him.

The Mechanics and Meaning of That Dial-Up Modem Sound ⇥ theatlantic.com

Alexis Madrigal:

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It’s the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

It was also the sound of the comforting reassurance that I wouldn’t be getting any phone calls for the next hour.

I Just Deleted All My Music ⇥ npr.org

Bob Boilen, writing for the All Songs Considered blog:

I just deleted over 25,000 songs from my iTunes library. I am going to trust in the cloud, where my library now lives. I’m a bit scared, but I backed everything up, took a deep breath and stepped into the future.

Boilen is using iTunes Match, which is a brave move. I like iTunes Match, and Spotify 1, Rdio, and all the rest of the cloud music services. But I don’t trust them to deliver my music reliably, or into the future.

I don’t think Apple will remove content from iTunes—it isn’t in their interest to do so. I also think it’s painfully clear to the labels that they need these services in order to stay relevant. But I don’t feel comfortable with handing the keys over just yet because there’s a possibility that they might remove music I listen to on a regular basis. This happened with Spotify, in fact: it used to have a “Radio” feature, which they removed a couple of years ago for unclear reasons (probably a licensing issue).

  1. I’m listening to this Spotify playlist right now, as a matter of fact. ↥︎