Month: August 2015

Apple’s iPhone and iPad Event Rumoured to Be Held on September 9 ⇥ buzzfeed.com

John Paczkowski, Buzzfeed:

Sources familiar with Apple’s plans tell BuzzFeed News the company intends to hold a special event the week of Sept. 7, with Wednesday the 9th being the most likely date. Sept. 9 is the same day on which Apple held this event last year.

Like Apple fall events past, this one too will focus on the company’s next-generation iPhones, which are expected to arrive at market with a pressure-sensitive Force Touch display, an improved camera system, and a significantly faster and power-efficient wireless chip. Sources say Apple executives are likely to show off the company’s latest iPads as well, though that 12.9-inch “iPad Pro” seems to be a wildcard, still.

Makes sense given the number of features in iOS 9 that are iPad-oriented. Apple will surely want to demo the split screen functionality, which — as of today — only works on one iPad model, the Air 2. A full lineup of new iPads that support all the new features looks more impressive, naturally.

Jon Voyage ⇥ avclub.com

Like many of you, I imagine, I tuned in to the final episode of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was kind of bittersweet: I can’t wait to see what Trevor Noah does with the show, but I will — of course — miss Stewart. Of all of the media critics I’ve read, watched, and listened to, Stewart is one of the most notable; I regard him as an influence on the way I approach many of the topics I write about here.

Stewart’s final bit was a wonderful speech on the different kinds of bullshit people should be able to recognize (not-safe-for-work language, obviously). And, in a similar vein, Caitlin PenzeyMoog, of the A/V Club, argues that news needs more smart analysis:

[Objectivity] — or the quest to be objective — renders journalists toothless. Boiled down, a journalist’s job is to call bullshit — on those in power, on institutions, on agendas. And it gets a whole lot harder to call bullshit when you can’t actually say it out loud. There are examples of journalists doing this, but they are the few outsiders in a sea of people who don’t ask hard questions or push politicians for fear of coming off as biased.

There is an uncomfortably narrow line between pushing an agenda and asking the right questions, but news media needs to do vastly more of the latter. People and organizations of power should respect a journalists’ ability to hold their feet to the fire, and those in power should be able to survive that because they’re doing the right thing. Without that, any interaction with the press is merely publicity and marketing, and any competent journalist aspires for more.

Traditional Watch Sales Reportedly Plunge in U.S. ⇥ bloomberg.com

Thomas Mulier, Bloomberg (autoplaying video warning):1

Retailers sold $375 million of watches during the month, 11 percent less than in June 2014, according to data from NPD Group. The 14 percent decline in unit sales was the largest since 2008, according to Fred Levin, head of the market researcher’s luxury division.

“The Apple Watch is going to gain a significant amount of penetration,” he said Thursday in a phone interview. “The first couple of years will be difficult for watches in fashion categories.”

All the earmarks of a flop.

  1. Maybe that’s why Topolsky was fired. It’s certainly a good reason. ↥︎

Apple Redesigns Website, Integrates with Store Pages ⇥ macstories.net

Smart decision. No longer is the buying experience so disconnected from the browsing experience — in effect, the entire site becomes both marketing and retail, somewhat paralleling the physical stores. Big move.

One thing I noticed is that between this change and the co-designed retail packaging, third-party accessories feel even more like they’re from Apple instead of merely being sold on behalf of them. Curious.

The Week of Big Android Security Flaws Continues ⇥ zdnet.com

Zack Whittaker at ZDNet:

New research, set to be announced at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, by FireEye researchers Tao Wei and Yulong Zhang outlined new ways to attack Android devices to extract user fingerprints.

The threat is for now confined mostly to Android devices that have fingerprint sensors, such as Samsung, Huawei, and HTC devices, which by volume remains low compared to iPhone shipments. But down the line by 2019, where it’s believed that at least half of all smartphone shipments will have a fingerprint sensor, the threat deepens.

Of the four attacks outlined by the researchers, one in particular — dubbed the “fingerprint sensor spying attack” — can “remotely harvest fingerprints in a large scale,” Zhang told ZDNet by email.

Shout out to Whittaker for the clarification that fingerprint extraction bugs are “confined mostly to Android devices that have fingerprint sensors”.

“We Don’t Want to Be a Digital Colony of the U.S. Internet Giants” ⇥ bloomberg.com

There are two things in this article that I find most fascinating. The first has nothing to do with the content of the article itself, but rather how Bloomberg writers Brad Stone and Vernon Silver frame it as poky little Google up against the big bad E.U. My second fascination is with the way the E.U. and its business interests perceive globalized — yet highly U.S.-centric — web companies.

Ripping CDs Is Illegal (Again) in the UK ⇥ torrentfreak.com

“Ernesto” at TorrentFreak:

“It is now unlawful to make private copies of copyright works you own, without permission from the copyright holder – this includes format shifting from one medium to another,” a spokesperson informed us.

The IPO specifically notes that copying a CD to an MP3 player is not permitted. This means that iTunes’ popular ripping feature, which Apple actively promotes during the software’s installation, is illegal.

This is so wilfully and blindingly stupid; it boggles the mind. This isn’t the issue it once was, with online purchasing and streaming quickly reducing the CD to distant memory, but it is still a mind-bending retraction of a clarification of the law that went into effect last year.

It gets dumber:

Simply copying a song in an automated computer backup or storing a copy on a private cloud hosting service is also against the law.

So we’re supposed to revert to the days when we only had one copy of something, and if that copy was damaged, that thing must be re-purchased? That’s hilariously quaint.

Also, under the current law iTunes is actively facilitating copyright infringement by promoting their CD-ripping functionality. This means that the company could face significant claims for damages.

Good luck with that.

Reddit Updates Their Content Policy ⇥ reddit.com

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman:

I know some of you are upset because we banned anything today, but the fact of the matter is we spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with a handful of communities, which prevents us from working on things for the other 99.98% (literally) of Reddit.

Oh, so you didn’t ban them because it would be doing the right thing by making it clear that racism, sexism, and intolerance are unacceptable, but because it was hard for you to deal with them? Frankly, that’s asinine, though I suppose it explains the long list of subjectively awful subreddits that have gone unaffected by this policy change.

Wall Street Bails on Big Media Stocks ⇥ recode.net

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Share prices for the biggest TV programmers are all nose-diving. Disney is down 9 percent. Time Warner is down 8 percent. Viacom and 21st Century Fox are down 7 percent. […]

The conventional wisdom, which seems right to me, is that all of this stems from Disney’s earnings call yesterday, when Bob Iger and co. admitted that yes, Disney had indeed seen subscriber losses at ESPN — just as the Wall Street Journal had written a month ago, in a piece that shook up the industry.

With this in mind, will the forthcoming Apple TV subscription service be reported and viewed as a media industry saviour — a la the early narrative that the iPad would save the print industry — or is it going to be seen as a thorn in media companies’ sides?

Android Security Fixes to Be Pushed to Nexus Devices Monthly ⇥ officialandroid.blogspot.ca

Android security engineer Adrian Ludwig:

Nexus devices have always been among the first Android devices to receive platform and security updates. From this week on, Nexus devices will receive regular OTA updates each month focused on security, in addition to the usual platform updates. The first security update of this kind began rolling out today, Wednesday August 5th, to Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 7, Nexus 9, Nexus 10, and Nexus Player. This security update contains fixes for issues in bulletins provided to partners through July 2015, including fixes for the libStageFright issues. At the same time, the fixes will be released to the public via the Android Open Source Project.

Regular security patches are a very good thing, and it’s great to see Google taking a more proactive approach. However, the final sentence of that quote illustrates the ongoing flaw of having the operating system so disconnected from the end user. These security updates still require Android partners to commit to releasing them in a timely way. To their credit, Samsung has committed to implementing these security fixes as soon as they’re available, but there’s a further caveat:

Samsung is currently in conversation with carriers around the world to implement the new approach. In collaboration with carriers and partners, more details about the specific models and timelines will be released soon.

That remains an awfully circuitous route to travel when a critical bug needs to be fixed.

Apple Pay to the Rescue ⇥ imore.com

Craig Hockenberry, in a guest piece for iMore:

Last week, I received an all-too-familiar call: One of our credit cards had been used to make a fraudulent transaction. […]

Luckily, my spouse had a backup card in her purse and could use it for the remainder of her trip. I, on the other hand, didn’t have another card—and I was on my way to the market to buy dinner. My fingers were crossed that the meager amount of cash in my pocket would be able to cover the charges. […]

Of course… I’m also the kind of person who likes to experiment with new technology. And, since I had my iPhone in my pocket, I decided to see what Apple Pay would do with a cancelled credit card.

I held my phone up to the reader and… it worked flawlessly.

Even after American companies eventually dump their shitty swipe-based cards in favour of EMV cards, the security benefits and lack of hassle are a huge boon for Apple Pay.

Windows 10 Quietly Includes Opt-Out Ad Targeting ⇥ rockpapershotgun.com

Alec Meer at Rock Paper Shotgun:

People aren’t so hot on paying for things these days, which means the money comes from harvesting data and flogging it to advertisers and other organisations who want to know exactly what we’re all up to online. Microsoft want a piece of that, so if you ever wondered why they’ve made the Windows 10 upgrade free to Win 7 & 8 users, here’s one possible answer. Windows 10 has all sorts of user tracking baked right in.

Importantly, you can opt out of what seems to be all this stuff (time will tell) either during installation or afterwards, though Microsoft swaddle it in a combination of dissembling “hey, this stuff’ll really help you get the information you want’ fluff and 45 pages of service agreement documents. I’ll refer you here and here for a detailed breakdown of the really worrying stuff, but the long and short of it is the operating system assigns you a unique advertising ID, which is is tied to the email address you’ve associated with Windows and fed data from a great many facets of your computer usage. Including the contents of messages and calendars, apps and networks, some purchases and whatever you upload to Microsoft’s unreliable OneDrive cloud storage. Using the Cortana search assistant makes the harvest even more aggressive, and of course the OS claims it’s all in the name of a better, more accurate online experience for you.

The amount of information gathered by Windows 10 at the core system level is pretty worrying from a privacy standpoint. Is it entirely unreasonable that the most basic versions of Windows will one day have contextual ads cluttering up system applications? “Looks like it’s going to be hot and sunny for your picnic on Saturday. Do you have sunscreen?”, or something like that.

I think the thing that perturbs me most is how all of these privacy-invasive technologies are wrapped in the eerily vague language of improving the user experience. First of all, no; second of all, says who? Users? I doubt it.

Why Do Apple Music’s Own Curated Playlists Have Songs That No One Can Play? ⇥ theverge.com

Nathan Ingraham, the Verge:

Between the shorter lengths and Apple’s smart recommendations, I found myself following a couple dozen playlists shortly after I started using Apple Music. By and large found them a really enjoyable way to find new tracks or dig in on a particular style, era, or artist. However, perusing these playlists has led me to one of the most ridiculous and unfathomable Apple Music bugs yet: a whole bunch of these playlists include songs that aren’t playable on Apple Music.

Yup, that’s right — I’ll be in the middle of enjoying Pitchfork’s Modern Americana Gold playlist and come across a song that has somehow been added to a playlist that Apple itself created, and that song will be greyed out, teasing me. It’s incredibly bizarre and frustrating and I have no idea how such a thing slipped past the humans curating these playlists.

Michael Rockwell comments:

I would guess that Apple isn’t limiting their curators strictly to the Apple Music library for the sake of future proofing. Apple hopes to eventually have all music available on the service and the currently unavailable tracks would automatically become playable once Apple acquires the proper rights.

I think Rockwell is right, but I think this is a way to coax labels into granting rights. It’s sort of like the name-and-shame battery menu in OS X, and the similar Settings panel in iOS. If you’re on that list, you’re responsible for screwing up the user experience.

This Is What an Engineer Looks Like ⇥ medium.com

Isis Anchalee reflects on a recruiting campaign for the company she works for, OneLogin, which featured a photo of her and a testimonial of why she enjoys working at the company:

Some people think I’m not making “the right face”. Others think that this is unbelievable as to what “female engineers look like”. News flash: this isn’t by any means an attempt to label “what female engineers look like.” This is literally just ME, an example of ONE engineer at OneLogin. The ad is supposed to be authentic. My words, my face, and as far as I am concerned it is.

I didn’t ask for any of this attention, and I’m rather uncomfortable with all of it. I’m just a human and I prefer to keep my life simple/reserved, but it blows my mind that my fully-clothed smiling face with unbrushed hair and minimal makeup on a white wall is seemingly more controversial in some communities than this simply because of my gender.

None of the male employees featured in this campaign have been subjected to the same backlash. Not one of them has heard that they don’t look like an engineer.

Happily, some good has come of this in the form of the #ILookLikeAnEngineer hashtag. I dumped a few from the last twenty minutes into a Storify, but you can find more posts on Twitter.

Update: Another excellent Storify collection.

The Utopian UI Architect ⇥ medium.com

Really interesting short interview-cum-essay by John Pavlus:

“I said, ‘What is this?’ and they said, ‘We don’t know yet,’” [Bret] Victor recalls. “It was an early prototype of the [iPad] hardware. Maybe twenty other people in the world knew about it. Nobody had answers. My job was to try to figure it out.”

Victor spent the next two months making “an app every week, explor[ing] new UI ideas” as part of a three-person “internal R&D prototyping group” that Apple had assembled. Soon, Victor says, the iPad became “a real project” and his group was reassigned to tinker with other experimental hardware. “Everyone [at Apple] was focused on the next product release, what needed to happen six months from now,” he says. “We were the ones looking at what could happen five or ten years from now.”

Inside the Failure of Google+ ⇥ mashable.com

Very few good products come from fear, and nobody wants that to be forced upon them. It’s almost as if Google hasn’t learned the lessons of Microsoft’s “Windows everywhere” policy, or the lukewarm reception to Windows Phone. Doing the same thing everyone else is doing after they have the inertia simply isn’t a good product philosophy.