Vicky Ward, New York magazine:
Who came up the idea of placing a 30‐foot square glass cube — the world’s “smallest skyscraper” — in the middle of the GM Building plaza? In that lightbulb moment, an unused basement that had caused headaches for its owners for more than 40 years morphed into what is arguably the most famous retail space in the world.
Craig Timberg, Washington Post:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Tuesday that new forms of encryption capable of locking law enforcement officials out of popular electronic devices imperil investigations of kidnappers and sexual predators, putting children at increased risk.
“It is fully possible to permit law enforcement to do its job while still adequately protecting personal privacy,” Holder said at a conference on child sexual abuse, according to a text of his prepared remarks. “When a child is in danger, law enforcement needs to be able to take every legally available step to quickly find and protect the child and to stop those that abuse children. It is worrisome to see companies thwarting our ability to do so.”
This is an awfully similar line of attack to that from the FBI, and it’s just so played. If our values must be significantly compromised so as to treat us all as criminals, then they’re not values — they’re hobbies.
Besides, it’s not as if encrypted information is making it impossible for law enforcement to do their job. All of the cases that Cyrus R. Vance Jr., in an op-ed for the WaPo, complains would be made unsolvable by this encryption would indeed be solvable. This encryption just makes it less likely that the rest of us won’t have as much of our stuff scooped up by snoops.
There are an awful lot of crappy Notification Centre widgets showing up in the App Store right now, but the people behind the Transit App have nailed it once again. I swear I receive zero compensation in any way for my endorsement of this app; it’s just really, really good. This is exactly what a Notification Centre widget should be like.
With so many of these newfangled smartphone OSes and lawsuits about who’s ripping off who, it can make one long for the good ol’ days of making fun of Windows for copying various features from the Mac. You know, “Redmond: start your photocopiers”, and all that jazz. And what a day to do it with the launch of Windows X.
*scrunches brows; checks old timey newspaper print*
Wait, it’s Windows 10? Not X?
Could have fooled me. Tom Warren covered Microsoft’s launch event for the Verge:
There’s a new universal search in the start menu that pulls in results from the web, and Microsoft is also talking up its “task view,” which helps users master Windows’ multitasking features. It looks fairly similar to Expose in OS X and allows users to set up different desktops for work, home, and other usage scenarios, switching apps between them at will.
Neat.
“It illustrates for Windows we have to address a breadth of users,” Belfiore said, moving on to show a big improvement to the command prompt: it now supports paste.
Paste on the command line? Sweet.
But Microsoft isn’t abandoning touch input. Belfiore said the Charms bar from Windows 8 has been carried over to Windows 10 with improvements of its own. “We want to support those Windows 8 users who have touch machines and getting a lot of benefit out of them.” For convertible devices like the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro, Microsoft is adding a new Continuum mode that aims to make the frequent switch between tablet mode and laptop mode more seamless.
Continuity, erm, Continuum sounds swell.
For real, though, I’m just teasing. Windows 10 sounds like a smart turnaround from the disaster that is Windows 8. Too bad it’s not going to ship until “late 2015”, a full three years after the release of Windows 8.
Jeffrey Toobin wrote a great piece about the obfuscation of information on the internet in the New Yorker. This part, in particular, stood out as poignant, though:
In Europe, the right to privacy trumps freedom of speech; the reverse is true in the United States. “Europeans think of the right to privacy as a fundamental human right, in the way that we think of freedom of expression or the right to counsel,” Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, said recently. “When it comes to privacy, the United States’ approach has been to provide protection for certain categories of information that are deemed sensitive and then impose some obligation not to disclose unless certain conditions are met.” Congress has passed laws prohibiting the disclosure of medical information the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, educational records the Buckley Amendment, and video-store rentals a law passed in response to revelations about Robert Bork’s rentals when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. Any of these protections can be overridden with the consent of the individual or as part of law-enforcement investigations.
There are some who will view the decisions of European courts to be vast overreaches of judicial authority. However, it is imperative to consider the immense power that Google has with its search engine and its dominance of that market. Companies and people in positions of greater power and reach should have different and greater levels of responsibility. If they don’t create that responsibility for themselves, it’s up to the law to step in and correct that oversight.